The Gazette 1994

GAZETTE

APRIL 1994

The Electronic Age - Telecommunication in Ireland

By Eamonn Hall, Oak Tree Press, Dublin 1993, 592pp, hardback £IR35.00 In the golden age of Irish monasticism, Christianity clung to the extreme western shores of Europe like barnacles on a distant rock, overlooked by the scouring eyes of barbarian gourmets. Then, our contribution to recivilising Europe was immense. When the radio and television age was ushered in, national concern moved from protecting our population from foreign influences to the possibility of evangelisation by use of the airwaves. So in 1958 the Pope expressed great personal interest in the proposed establishment of an Irish television service as a weapon to combat "irreligion and materialism". Instead of looking inwards, the hope was to establish a transmitter powerful enough to reach trans-oceanic territories. Alas, these hopes were unrealised and Ireland remains an island allowed trans-oceanic communication only by means of the telecommunications network, without even a shortwave radio station and bombarded from the very territories that might once have been touched by our guiding hand. Doctor Eamonn Hall, Company Solicitor for Telecom Eireann, tells the story of the development of telecommunications from the first clumsy attempts with Morse Code, through the reeds stuck to the electro- magnets in the laboratory of Alexander Bell, down to the full colour development of the moving pictures that now dominate the national agenda. Even back in the days when one could libel a man with a frown and wink a lady's reputation down, human communication was regulated by law. With every advance in communication the alarming possibility opened up of power and influence seeping through to people who, by the nature of the medium, could be distant from centres of control, possibly unidentifiable and potentially subversive. No government could allow this. In consequence telecommunication is one of the most

At the launch of The Electronic Age - Telecommunications in Ireland were l-r: the Hon. Mr. Justice Liam Hamilton, President of the High Court; Michael V. O 'Mahony, President of the Law Society; Dr. Eamonn Hall, the author and Harold A. Whelehan SC, Attorney General.

regulated areas of life. Law can be divorced from its context and presented as a dry imperative the motivation for which might only have been known to the generation that witnessed the spur against the ordinary inertia of government. Since government had to be concerned with introducing the infrastructure of telegraph poles, of telephone exchanges, of radio trans- mitters and a television broadcasting station, politicians were intimately involved in this task of finding money and, in paying the piper, of ensuring that the right tunes were played. Some of the arguments advanced by our leaders on these expenditures could be seen as ludicrous if not put in the context of a thrifty age before vast taxation and European Union largesse. So, in 1959, Patrick J. Hillery was seriously concerned that if there were to be Irish television that non-Irish goods should not be advertised as such a step would "tend to have a demoralising influence on national morale". Moreover, the Minister for Finance thought that if people bought television sets that capital availability might shrink the economy. Here was prescience of the dominating age of Japanese electronic exports. Of course, people have a constitutional right to communicate. The human species could not possibly have evolved, either through hunting or, as

Doctor Morgan suggests, through communal swimming, to its current babble of voices unless culture was capable of being stored and transmitted through speech. Messages can be delivered from angels but the other side , of human nature has its advocates and i catalysts as well. So, it has been claimed since medieval times and is still claimed | by some, that the devil appears to his followers every seven years and delivers messages in rhyming couplets. The Constitution has always been a parental document, the courts have always been - and continue to be - organised like schools. The benevolent hand of ultimate responsibility can therefore tell | us, for our own good, what we ought to see and what we ought to hear. Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, first invoked in 1960, was lifted just after the publication of this book in 1993 to herald a media deluge of bearded men j who owe their allegiance to a higher J ideal to which the State does not j subscribe and of which the State feared ! the expression for 33 years. Doctor Hall i quotes Doctor Cruise O 'Brien on the programme used as a justification for tightening section 31 in 1975, broadcast I on RTE television and which concerned itself solely with the "violence of British soldiers" something, to which, as far as the programme was concerned j "no IRA men had ever contributed". | Although section 31 is gone now we I may well see its like again. A writer of

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