It is difficult to convince many members of the public, including a good number of journalists in the print media, that RTÉ is not subjected to a daily barrage of intimidatory calls from Leinster House, writes Wesley Boyd.
In my 16 years as director of news in the national broadcasting organisation I received a total of three phone calls from politicians.
One of the calls was from Charles J. Haughey, who was taoiseach at the time. He rang me to apologise for an incident which he said he had just heard about. One of the coterie of hangers-on who surrounded him (and were indulged by him) had rung me, in a drunken state, one night to inform me that he had it on the highest authority that my days in RTÉ were numbered because of the things we were broadcasting about the government and the taoiseach.
"I understand one of my so-called friends rang you the other night," said Mr Haughey. "You know I had nothing to do with it. The fellow who rang you was not acting on my behalf or with my knowledge. You know what he's like - when he gets a few drinks he goes overboard. I'm sorry about the whole thing." A few days later he came into the radio news studio at Donnybrook to do an interview for the This Week programme. As I accompanied him and his advisers to the studio he pulled me aside and reiterated his apology: "You know me long enough to know I would have nothing to do with that sort of thing."
My first confrontational encounter with Mr Haughey was during the general election of 1965. I was commissioned by the now defunct Illustrated London News to write a brief article about the campaign to accompany a visual portrayal by an internationally acclaimed photographer. We started our tour at the Fianna Fáil headquarters in Lower Mount Street where Mr Haughey was director of elections. We were civilly received and I explained that we wanted a few photographers of Mr Haughey consulting with his election team. He got out of his seat and stood rigidly before a map of Ireland. "You can take me here," he told the photographer.
My colleague explained that he did not take posed shots and would like something more informal. "If you just sit down and talk to your colleagues I'll wander around and take some shots without disturbing you," he said. "You can take me here," Mr Haughey barked from his position in front of the map. "I don't take pictures like that," said the photographer. "Then you and your leg man can f--- off." We did.
The photographer had a plane to catch back to London that evening and needed pictures. We went up to Dublin North West and spent a couple of hours with Declan Costello, the Fine Gael candidate, doing his round of the houses. Mr Costello got three pages of coverage in the Illustrated London News which, while pleasing, hardly gained him a vote in Dublin North West.
As a correspondent for this newspaper I travelled around Europe with Jack Lynch and Mr Haughey, then Minister for Finance, covering their lobbying campaign to gain entry for Ireland to the Common Market. Once in Paris I approached Mr Haughey in the Irish embassy after he and Mr Lynch had met President de Gaulle. I was running out of cash - in those days journalists did not rise to credit cards. "Any chance, Minister, you could lend me 50 dollars until we get back to Dublin?" I asked. "No problem," says he, and peels off the 50 greenbacks from his wallet. It was a period of erratic currency fluctuations. As I gratefully departed he called me back. "By the way," he said , "when we get back home I want that back in dollars. None of your ould sterling or anything like that."
When Jack Lynch, who had sacked him in 1970 in advance of the Arms Trial, brought Mr Haughey back into the Cabinet in 1977 as Minister for Health and Social Welfare, we decided to seek an interview with him for the This Week programme. While he was highly sensitive about his public profile Mr Haughey, unlike some other Ministers, did not aggressively seek publicity and did interviews only when he felt he had something worthwhile to say. He agreed to the request, but when the editor and the presenter of the programme met him in Government Buildings he attempted to impose conditions: no questions about the Arms Trial - that was all in the past.
The team had intended to ask him how he and Mr Lynch had mended their fences since his sacking. They retired from the Minister's office and contacted me at Donnybrook. (Such was the aura of brooding menace around Mr Haughey that they felt they could not use the phone in his office but went outside to a public call box). After consultation we decided to tell Mr Haughey that his first major interview as a member of the new Cabinet would have no credibility if the question was not put and answered. Forever the pragmatist, he took the point without further argument and the interview went ahead.
And the other two political phone calls I received during my days as director of news? One was from Michael O'Leary, then Minister for Labour, to advise me that a long-running strike in the public sector was about to be called off. The other was from Fianna Fáil TD Jim Tunney to complain that he had been mentioned in a news item alongside a picture of Jim Tully, the Labour TD.