FROM THE ARCHIVES:Proposals to provide a second television channel to people living away from the east coast and the Border, who could receive only RTÉ's single channel, created a charged debate in the mid-1970s about broadcasting, culture, nationalism and politics. In his Roots column, Liam de Paor used the debate to tease out some of the underlying factors involved. – JOE JOYCE
‘FREEDOM” IS a word much used in earlier phases of conflict and struggle in Ireland. “Freedom” was commonly the declared objective of nationalists. It is less commonly heard in our recent troubles. When it is mentioned, it is likely to be by loyalists rather than nationalists. Where earlier generations thought of themselves as struggling for “freedom”, this generation has concerned itself more . . . with equality, or with “civil rights”.
“Freedom” in any case had long been used by nationalists in a quite limited sense. Early republicans, perhaps, applied it to individuals and aimed at a state where the liberties of the citizen would be secured. Succeeding generations of nationalists tended to apply it to the nation . . . and to display illiberal attitudes to those individuals within the national community as it was defined whose support for the nationalist cause was weak or absent.
Nationalism pushed to any extreme is illiberal, for its demand for loyalty overrides what an individual may conceive to be his right to choose his priority of allegiance. So the pursuit of Irish freedom always carried with it the possibility of a diminution, for some, of individual freedom. All the Bills drafted to provide any form of self-government for Ireland contained some provisions which, foreseeing this danger, endeavoured to safeguard liberties. The Constitution of the Irish Free State was quite liberal because of such provisions, imposed on the Free State rather than offered by it. As it happened, the early rulers of the State were in sympathy with such liberalism and were not anxious to exact a full allegiance of sentiment as well as will from those who regretted the change from British rule.
However, the liberalism of the Free State’s Constitution did not survive. Restrictions affecting divorce and other matters began to be imposed, and the new Constitution of 1937 embodied a very different outlook and political philosophy, qualifying its guarantees of liberty and endeavouring to express the ethos of nationalist Ireland as understood by conservative Catholics of the 1930s.
One of the freedoms which must come into any . . . discussion of broadcasting is freedom of expression. This has been important to Irish people. It has been advocated by nationalists when they greatly needed it to advance their cause through newspapers and other media of persuasion and propaganda. But again, when the nation was . . . enshrined in a state, the requirements of the state soon came to compete with the requirements of the individual.
Nationalist leadership has tended to be paternalistic or schoolmasterish, reluctant to entrust the “nation” wholly to the people who compose it.
We have not a Bill of Rights, nor any of the real guarantees of freedom of publication. At best we have a Bill of provisional concessions; our society is addicted to banning and to protecting us from ourselves by means of prohibitions. So, the Irish State in its independence became notorious throughout the world not for any freedom, but for the opposite: our ridiculous system of censorship. The puritans of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s are now somewhat out of favour: but the new puritans who impose political censorship are much more dangerous, all the more so since they operate in an atmosphere very lacking in the eternal vigilance which has been accepted as the price of liberty.
The people who demand choice in their television viewing have hit upon one of the essentials of freedom, for choice is what constitutes freedom. Perhaps it is the lack of a real tradition of freedom here that makes it possible to offer, instead of the bread of real choice, the stone of a second state-controlled system from which they must come to feel even more alienated than they do from the state-controlled system already available.
http://url.ie/6i5q