An "Open Letter" to RTE Director-General Cathal Goan

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Thursday January 08, 2004 17:17 by Anthony Coughlan

re: Mr John Palmer and the EU Constitution debate

From:Anthony Coughlan
To: Cathal Goan

AN OPEN LETTER TO RTE DIRECTOR-GENERAL CATHAL GOAN

re: Mr John Palmer and the EU Constitution debate



Dear Mr Goan,

May I urge you to take steps to ensure that RTE's Current Affairs
programming offers more balanced outside commentary in its coverage of the
EU Constitution debate.


Last night "Prime Time" had on Mr John Palmer, director of the European
Policy Institute, Brussels, to tell its viewers that the German-French
demand that the proposed EU Constitution provide for EU laws to be made on
the basis of a simple EU population headcount was the most "democratic"
method. This morning's "Morning Ireland" again had Mr Palmer pushing his
euro-integrationist line in discussing a two-tier EU.


Mr Palmer's designation as director of a European Policy Institute may
mislead RTE's viewers/listeners as to his uncritically euro-integrationist
political views, although they must be well-known to those of your Current
Affairs staff for whom Mr Palmer has been their favourite resident Brussels
guru for years.


Like so many of the ex-Trotskyists who people the European Movement - of
whom Joschka Fischer and Danny Cohn-Bendit MEP are perhaps the most
egregious - Mr Palmer is an ideological missionary. He regards the Nation
State as out of date and such concepts as national democracy and national
independence as right-wing and therefore reactionary.


From this standpoint it is quite logical to regard EU laws made on the
basis of a cross-continental headcount as "democratic". But the
implications from a more conventional democratic standpoint are startling:
the smaller EU countries should fall in line with what Germany and France
want because their populations are bigger. By the same logic the Irish
should never have left the United Kingdom, but bowed to the will of its
overwhelmingly English majority. Or the Russians were entitled to run the
USSR in their interests because they constituted a majority there.


I remember well in June 2001, on the day after Irish voters voted No to the
Nice Treaty - the Treaty incidentally which, strongly backed by Taoiseach
Bertie Ahern, opened the legal path to the two-tier EU that Mr Ahern now
claims to be opposed to - Morning Ireland had its entire programme
devoted to half-a-dozen one-sided commentators all telling the nation that
the Nice referendum must be re-run to reverse the voters' judgement. Mr
Palmer unsurprisingly was one of them.


Seeing him on "Prime Time" last night and hearing him again on "Morning
Ireland" this morning makes me fear that RTE is going to have an
unchallenged Mr Palmer pushing his euro-integrationist views at us week
after week, if not day after day, between now and the end of the Ireland's
EU Presidency, with the eurocrats of Iveagh House, Alan Dukes's European
Movement and sundry other euro-acolytes and eurofanatics mentally cheering
him on!


Can RTE's Current Affairs people find no commentators abroad who are not
missionaries for further EU integration and ideological outriders of the Mr
Romano Prodi's Brussels Commission? I would be happy to give them
suggestions if they should need them.

Mr Palmer is of course entitled to his views, and RTE is entitled to air
them. But your viewers and listeners are also entitled to have them
balanced by more critical ones. Mr Palmer's designation as director of his
Brussels European Policy Institute should not be allowed to endow either
himself or his Institute with a status of spurious objectivity when it
comes to issues like the draft EU Constitution or a two-tier EU.


If RTE's Current Affairs programming gives Mr Palmer the opportunity of
advocating policies that will undermine what little is left of our national
democracy and political independence by means of the proposed EU
Constitution, then supporters of those values should be given equal
opportunities to counter him. May I put it to you that RTE's legal
obligations under the Broadcasting Acts require no less.

Because of the wider public interest of this matter, I am sending copies of
this "open letter" to various opinion-formers and members of the media.

Yours etc.

Anthony Coughlan

Secretary
(Tels.: 01- 8305792 / 6081898)



PS. May I take the opportunity while I am writing to you to mention
another matter relating to RTE: You will doubtless be reading, if you have
not already read, the just-published book by Professor Farrel Corcoran,
until recently Chairman of the RTE Authority,"RTE and the Globalisation of
Irish Television" (Intellect Books, Bristol, 2004).


I read with special interest the half dozen pages Professor Corcoran
devotes to what he calls "The Coughlan Appeal," where he seeks to justify
RTE's decision to appeal to the Supreme Court against the High Court's
judgement in my favour in the legal action I took in 1998 against RTE's
unfair allocation of political party broadcasts in referendums.


I am afraid this is a rather self-serving account which leaves out key
facts that you and others may not know. Most obviously it omits reference
to the vote on the RTE Authority sanctioning the appeal, in which such key
members as Messrs Garret FitzGerald, Billy Attley and Des Geraghty - all
old political sparring partners of mine on the EU - were adamant it should
be made.


Their reasons were undoubtedly far more related to their views on the EU
and their hostility to mine than to the desire to clarify the legal
position of free broadcasts in general elections, which Professor Corcoran
claims was what motivated the appeal. If the latter was the case the
Authority would have accepted your predecessor Bob Collins's suggestion
that RTE might offer to contribute to my legal costs if I should lose. Dr
Garret FitzGerald clobbered that by saying it would make the Authority
"look absurd." Luckily for me, I did not lose.


There is nothing about all this in Professor Corcoran's account, but much
vivid detail in Bob Quinn's book "Maverick, A Dissident View of
Broadcasting Today" (Brandon Books, 2001), which quotes Dr FitzGerald's
remark.


I am happy to say that Bob Quinn and Betty Purcell, the only members of the
then Authority with practical broadcasting experience, voted against RTE
making what was undoubtedly a politically motivated appeal, which in the
event cost Irish taxpayers some money and RTE some of its reputation, and
for which Dr Garret FitzGerald, supported by Authority Chairman Farrel
Corcoran, was the prime person responsible.