By John O'Brien

Freedom of the press — what freedom?

Freedom of the press has been to the fore in newspaper headlines over the last week or so, with the Supreme Court ruling on leaking confidential details supplied to the Mahon planning corruption tribunal welcomed enthusiastically, especially by The Irish Times whose editor Geraldine Kennedy faces punitive sanction for her role in publishing documents leaked from the tribunal.
But it would be a misguided republican who would join in their celebrations.  Papers like The Irish Times and The Irish Independent publish selectively what suits them when it suits them.  For Geraldine Kennedy, it seems the chance to damage Fianna Fáil electorally by revealing details about payments made to Bertie Ahern was far more important than the integrity of the Tribunal process and the real rooting out of corruption from Irish public life.
And this explains why the Times is so curiously reticent when Fine Gael and Michael Lowry are under scrutiny, and why the Indo gave so much space to Michael Lowry’s sob story about how his life had been shattered by all the nasty insinuations made against him.
As Oscar Wilde said about the man who read Dickens’ account of the death of Little Nell without breaking down in tears – that he had to have a heart of stone – so only the most ruthless among us could have failed to be moved by this tale of woe and prurient pursuit of how a mobile phone licence worth hundreds of millions was sold by Michael Lowry to his good friend Denis O’Brien for about twenty.
It all comes back to the point that Todd Andrews, the Fianna Fáil republican made: “Freedom of the press is the freedom to write what the owners of the press want written!”
And as the press is controlled by private, propertied interests, that’s the slant they put on the news.  These interests are entrenched now as well in local radio, but here there is a public sector which can supposedly be free of the commercial interests of the private investors.
But how does RTÉ fulfil its remit?  Does it give access to the airwaves to all points of view, or is it also selective in what it will allow?
Furthermore, RTÉ has a particular obligation under the Broadcasting Acts to promote the Irish language and Irish national culture.
During the week, a major event occurred of relevance to this when Seán Ó Cuirreáin, the Coimisinéir Teanga, published the Annual Report of the language rights monitoring body for 2006.
There were a number of points of news interest in the Report: the refusal of local authorities to register addresses in Irish for electoral purposes; the failure to make available to Gaeltacht and all-Irish schools child protection guidelines for schools; the pressure on students in such schools to take exams in English rather than Irish; and the validity or otherwise of planning regulations made in defiance of the placenames directives in the language equality legislation.
Both The Irish Independent and The Irish Times gave significant coverage to this report, even though neither publication is a bastion of Irish language sentiment. But RTÉ completely ignored the story on all its television news bulletins and gave only a cursory mention on English language radio.  Both TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta, of course, gave extensive coverage, but RTÉ’s prime outlet preferred to talk about Ukraine rather than the Irish language and the rights of Irish-speaking citizens.
In fact, RTÉ acted exactly as Environment minister Dick Roche did, who claimed that it was “only sensible” to insist on English-only addresses.

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This hatred of the Irish language, and determination to ban it into the outer darkness, was, however, matched – suitably – by the Belfast Telegraph which, at a time when the DUP and Sinn Féin are working sensibly to try and establish positive working arrangements in the North, instead published a screaming headline to the effect that there was fear of a schools crisis because Sinn Féin were nominating a minister to take charge of education.
Of course, the sky didn’t fall in when Martin McGuinness was Minister for Education previously, and it’s unlikely to fall in this time either, but instead of presenting the issues in a positive way the Tele – as is the wont of liberals when the chips are down – revealed its nasty underbelly and did its best to stir things up.
Now, I wonder in whose interest that was?