by Ray Bassett
The recent passing of RTE figure, Joe Mulholland, was widely acknowledged and mourned by the mainstream media in the Republic. Mulholland was a major figure in the station, first as Head of Current Affairs and then, Director of News and, eventually, Managing Director of the station itself. He yielded enormous influence in the Irish national broadcaster during some of the most intense periods of the Troubles.
While there was much favourable and well-deserved comment on Mulholland’s long period of public service and his establishment of the prestigious MacGill Summer School in Glenties, county Donegal, any balanced assessment of his career would also have to acknowledge, that he also presided over a period of unprecedented political censorship of anti-Government views at RTE. That censorship percolated every aspect of the station’s activities.
Within RTE, a number of individuals from the Marxist Workers’ Party, (the Stickies), organised a ruthless internal campaign to oppose the articulation of any Republican or Nationalist sentiment and worked hard to ensure it was excluded from the station’s output. They secretly formed the Ned Stapleton Cumann. The membership list of the Cumann was never published. However, the leading figure in it was Eoghan Harris, a producer in RTE. They ensured that individuals with Republican views or sympathies were not invited as a guest on shows and that members of the Workers’ Party were regularly invited on to push that party’s views. It was believed that even public audiences for shows were vetted to exclude those of known Republican opinions. This was to create the misleading impression that the Irish population was anti Republican. The Cumann strongly supported State censorship under the Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which precluded any interviews with Sinn Féin members.
The flagship RTE current affairs programme, Today Tonight, was a stronghold of the Stapleton Cumann. It regularly shaped the station’s narrative on events, north of the border. Mulholland admitted later that he did not seek to root out this clandestine group but rather was influenced by their outlook. He said his own journey from a Republican background to being implacably opposed to the IRA was down to Harris’ influence that antipathy to the IRA seemed to have been extended to anyone with strong Irish Nationalist sympathies.
When a young law graduate from Belfast, Mary McAleese, joined the Today Tonight team in 1979 as a reporter and presenter, she encountered hostility because of her Nationalist background. She was astonished to find that RTE did not regard the decision of Bobby Sands to stand in the 1981 by-election, as a hunger striker, as important and was giving the matter meagre coverage. She was discouraged from making her views known.
Former RTE producer, Betty Purcell, also outlined her experiences. She claimed that she and a number of others were driven by a journalistic agenda that RTE should cover all sides. Their reward was to be “name-called and pilloried”. She described that atmosphere as one of intimidation and leading to self-censorship.
Across town on the northern side of the Liffey, an equally hostile environment for Republicans was to be found in the corridors of the Irish Independent Group where Eoghan Harris’ former wife was a senior editor on the Sunday Independent. That newspaper was to disgrace itself later in its hysterical and totally unfair assault on John Hume for having the temerity of seeking to bring an end to the Troubles with the Hume/Adams dialogue. Hume of course was later to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Gerry Adams was also discourteously treated by Gay Byrne when he appeared on RTE’s Late, Late Show. It all looks so petty and ridiculous in retrospect. I myself was libelled in Sunday Independent for attending a Republican funeral in Belfast, under instructions from the Irish Government. The circumstances are outlined in my recent book “The Traveller’s Tale”.
The only exception to the blanket suffocating of pro Nationalist views was at the Irish Press on Burgh Quay, where editor, Tim Pat Coogan, alone refused to engage in the officially sanctioned conformity. For his troubles, Coogan was regarded with official suspicion, with Minister, Conor Cruise O’Brien, privately pressing for Coogan’s imprisonment. Tim Pat described to me recently the atmosphere of intimidation and ridicule he was subjected to at the time, including pressure on his employer to reign him in.
The courageous decision of John Hume to engage with Gerry Adams in their dialogue in the 1990s helped to end the groupthink of the time and expose the futility of the censorship policy.
The arrival of Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach, and the development of the Peace Process also changed the environment and greatly lessened the influence of the Workers’ Party in RTE but in their time they did create a very negative and biased narrative towards Northern Nationalists. Throughout the Troubles, the Irish national broadcaster RTE, and indeed much of the Dublin print media, made very little contribution to uncovering deep and dark secrets. It is hard to think of a single major scoop by the station during those momentous days, in contrast with British broadcasters.
I was working for the Irish Government during much of the Troubles as a “Traveller”. This entailed spending long periods in the North, seeking information for the authorities in Dublin. A very important source area was the local media who were very clued in on developments politically and importantly within the paramilitary organisations, information that was vital for the Irish Government. The Dublin media did not seem to have the same depth of contacts or indeed knowledge of the local situation.
It is not a record that the Dublin based media can be proud of. The role of the fourth estate in a democratic society is to hold the authorities to account. I do not think that anybody could seriously claim that the media in the Republic ever came close to fulfilling that solemn obligation during the Troubles.
by Ray Bassett
The recent passing of RTE figure, Joe Mulholland, was widely acknowledged and mourned by the mainstream media in the Republic. Mulholland was a major figure in the station, first as Head of Current Affairs and then, Director of News and, eventually, Managing Director of the station itself. He yielded enormous influence in the Irish national broadcaster during some of the most intense periods of the Troubles.
While there was much favourable and well-deserved comment on Mulholland’s long period of public service and his establishment of the prestigious MacGill Summer School in Glenties, county Donegal, any balanced assessment of his career would also have to acknowledge, that he also presided over a period of unprecedented political censorship of anti-Government views at RTE. That censorship percolated every aspect of the station’s activities.
Within RTE, a number of individuals from the Marxist Workers’ Party, (the Stickies), organised a ruthless internal campaign to oppose the articulation of any Republican or Nationalist sentiment and worked hard to ensure it was excluded from the station’s output. They secretly formed the Ned Stapleton Cumann. The membership list of the Cumann was never published. However, the leading figure in it was Eoghan Harris, a producer in RTE. They ensured that individuals with Republican views or sympathies were not invited as a guest on shows and that members of the Workers’ Party were regularly invited on to push that party’s views. It was believed that even public audiences for shows were vetted to exclude those of known Republican opinions. This was to create the misleading impression that the Irish population was anti Republican. The Cumann strongly supported State censorship under the Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which precluded any interviews with Sinn Féin members.
The flagship RTE current affairs programme, Today Tonight, was a stronghold of the Stapleton Cumann. It regularly shaped the station’s narrative on events, north of the border. Mulholland admitted later that he did not seek to root out this clandestine group but rather was influenced by their outlook. He said his own journey from a Republican background to being implacably opposed to the IRA was down to Harris’ influence that antipathy to the IRA seemed to have been extended to anyone with strong Irish Nationalist sympathies.
When a young law graduate from Belfast, Mary McAleese, joined the Today Tonight team in 1979 as a reporter and presenter, she encountered hostility because of her Nationalist background. She was astonished to find that RTE did not regard the decision of Bobby Sands to stand in the 1981 by-election, as a hunger striker, as important and was giving the matter meagre coverage. She was discouraged from making her views known.
Former RTE producer, Betty Purcell, also outlined her experiences. She claimed that she and a number of others were driven by a journalistic agenda that RTE should cover all sides. Their reward was to be “name-called and pilloried”. She described that atmosphere as one of intimidation and leading to self-censorship.
Across town on the northern side of the Liffey, an equally hostile environment for Republicans was to be found in the corridors of the Irish Independent Group where Eoghan Harris’ former wife was a senior editor on the Sunday Independent. That newspaper was to disgrace itself later in its hysterical and totally unfair assault on John Hume for having the temerity of seeking to bring an end to the Troubles with the Hume/Adams dialogue. Hume of course was later to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Gerry Adams was also discourteously treated by Gay Byrne when he appeared on RTE’s Late, Late Show. It all looks so petty and ridiculous in retrospect. I myself was libelled in Sunday Independent for attending a Republican funeral in Belfast, under instructions from the Irish Government. The circumstances are outlined in my recent book “The Traveller’s Tale”.
The only exception to the blanket suffocating of pro Nationalist views was at the Irish Press on Burgh Quay, where editor, Tim Pat Coogan, alone refused to engage in the officially sanctioned conformity. For his troubles, Coogan was regarded with official suspicion, with Minister, Conor Cruise O’Brien, privately pressing for Coogan’s imprisonment. Tim Pat described to me recently the atmosphere of intimidation and ridicule he was subjected to at the time, including pressure on his employer to reign him in.
The courageous decision of John Hume to engage with Gerry Adams in their dialogue in the 1990s helped to end the groupthink of the time and expose the futility of the censorship policy.
The arrival of Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach, and the development of the Peace Process also changed the environment and greatly lessened the influence of the Workers’ Party in RTE but in their time they did create a very negative and biased narrative towards Northern Nationalists. Throughout the Troubles, the Irish national broadcaster RTE, and indeed much of the Dublin print media, made very little contribution to uncovering deep and dark secrets. It is hard to think of a single major scoop by the station during those momentous days, in contrast with British broadcasters.
I was working for the Irish Government during much of the Troubles as a “Traveller”. This entailed spending long periods in the North, seeking information for the authorities in Dublin. A very important source area was the local media who were very clued in on developments politically and importantly within the paramilitary organisations, information that was vital for the Irish Government. The Dublin media did not seem to have the same depth of contacts or indeed knowledge of the local situation.
It is not a record that the Dublin based media can be proud of. The role of the fourth estate in a democratic society is to hold the authorities to account. I do not think that anybody could seriously claim that the media in the Republic ever came close to fulfilling that solemn obligation during the Troubles.