The Gazette 1994

GAZETTE

APRIL 1994

The Electronic Age -

Telecommunication in Ireland

By Eamonn Hall, Oak Tree Press,

Dublin 1993, 592pp, hardback

£IR35.00

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.

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

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

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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