MAIRE Geoghegan-Quinn's announcement last week that she is to leave politics while still in her 40s highlighted the strains that a political career can placed upon the private lives of politicians. It also raised issues concerning the relationship between journalism and politics.
However, in the light of her own account of this affair in the Sunday Times, journalistic intrusiveness does not seem to have been the sole factor in her decision; she had already twice considered withdrawing from politics because of the impact on her children of picketing of her house by disgruntled constituents, combined with the grossly excessive constituency pressures that are a feature in particular of rural Irish politics.
Nevertheless, an intrusive journalistic inquiry about events affecting her son at school was the immediate precipitating factor in her final decision. She chose to handle this inquiry by responding to the questions put to her, apparently because of a belief that failure to answer might have led to the appearance of a more damaging, because ill-informed, story.
However, her decision to provide information when invited to do so does not diminish the offence of the intrusion on her son's right to privacy.
I am strongly sympathetic to the need to re-examine our libel laws with a view to removing inhibitions that may currently exist in relation to the investigation and exposure of possible malpractices by a small minority of politicians, public servants and business people. If we are to exercise some control over incompetence, and if we are to inhibit the growth of corruption in public and business affairs, investigative journalism needs to be encouraged, rather than inhibited by over-protective libel laws.
Moreover, it is right to pay tribute to the manner in which Irish journalism - in sharp contrast to journalism in Britain - has hitherto refrained from voyeuristic exposes of issues relating to politicians' private lives, where these are irrelevant to their public performances. However, if the laws of libel are to be modified so as to facilitate genuine investigative journalism, this would need to be accompanied by balancing measures to protect the privacy rights of the families of public figures generally. And the rights of children must be respected by journalists themselves as well as by others in the community.
However, journalism owes another duty to politics: a duty to inform the public adequately about the legislative as well as the executive process. The executive is already subject to minute scrutiny by our media, which rightly demands fuller information about processes of government than Governments have hitherto been willing to concede.
THE Freedom of Information Bill, soon to reach the statute book, is about to produce a veritable - and overdue - revolution in this area.
This Bill will actually reverse the presumption of secrecy upon which Governments have hitherto relied: the onus will now be upon governments - and upon local authorities too within a couple of years - to justify any attempt to withhold information which a member of the public or a journalist may seek.
But the media do not apply similar scrutiny to the legislative end of our political system. For many years past, serious coverage of the work of the Dail and Seanad has virtually been abandoned.
To be sure, the Order of Business - which is when rows may occur - and Question Time are covered, but there is relatively little serious comment on these exchanges. And of most of the rest of the extensive work of the Dail and Seanad, and their committees, we hear little.
We are, of course, told from time to time that the Dail chamber is often empty, save for the incumbent speaker and one or two people on the opposite benches. True
But Oireachtas members will tell you, so is the press gallery most of the time - although of course some journalists as well as some Oireachtas members will be listening to the debate through monitors in their offices.
But how much of these debates ever appear in the papers? To that question journalists may, of course, respond: how many of the speeches made in the Dail are worth reporting?
Of course many are not - but would it not be worthwhile to comment briefly on such debates - telling the public which members actually spoke well and seriously, and which of them confined themselves to trivial point-scoring?
One feature of bail reporting in recent decades has been the growing reliance of speakers on prepared texts - not even always prepared by themselves. This practice has virtually killed spontaneity, driving out any possibility of oratory and contributing to the unwillingness of Dail deputies, and to a lesser degree senators, to sit and listen to each other.
Why then have many deputies come to rely on scripts, which are laborious to produce? Because they are told, and experience has seemed to confirm to them, that virtually their only hope of being reported at all is to provide the press gallery with copies of what they intend to say. And once having produced a script, they often feel bound to stick to it.
As for the committee and report stages of debates, where the bulk of the real work of Dail and Seanad is done, little of what happens during these debates is ever even referred to by the press.
ADMITTEDLY, these debates are often technical and difficult for the uninitiated to follow and, inevitably, some of the issues raised by way of amendment in these debates are relatively unimportant.
Nevertheless, the quality of the review and revision of legislation at these stages of Bills is the real test of the quality of parliament's work.
And so the absence even of reports that these debates have taken place, or of any evaluation of the performances of either Ministers or backbenchers in these discussions, means that the public is left with virtually no means of judging the effectiveness either of individual members of the Oireachtas or of the law-making process itself - of which these debates are the essential core.
We all enjoy the fun poked at the foibles, and at times absurdities, of politicians in the course of well-written "colour" pieces by able journalists, but when these colour pieces come to dominate parliamentary reporting - as seems to be the case here and in Britain - to the virtual exclusion of the actual work of the Oireachtas, it is not surprising that politicians are held in less and less esteem.
To correct the current dangerous distortion of the reality of parliamentary politics will not be easy. It might require some changes in the terms of reference of parliamentary and political correspondents, and perhaps some redeployment of specialised correspondents to cover technical Oireachtas debates. But this is something at which editors need to look, if respect for our democratic institutions is not to be inadvertently trivialised and dangerously weakened.