RTE'S decision not to give free broadcasts to campaigners in the current referendum campaigns has been condemned as "timid and irresponsible" by the man who forced the station to stop allocating them only to political parties.
Mr Anthony Coughlan won a High Court case a fortnight ago in which he objected to RTE's policy in the 1995 divorce referendum campaign of allocating uncontested broadcasts only to certain established political parties. That policy had resulted in RTE allocating 42.5 minutes uncontested time to the Yes side and just 10 minutes to the No. Mr Justice Carney found that RTE's failure to allocate equal time for uncontested broadcasts by the Yes and No sides had resulted in inequality causing "unconstitutional unfairness".
RTE's response to this judgment has been to allocate no uncontested broadcasts at all to the campaigns for and against the Belfast Agreement and the Amsterdam Treaty. The station said on Wednesday that it had concluded that it was "virtually impossible to structure an arrangement which was fair, equitable and non-discriminatory in relation to political parties registered in Dail Eireann and non-parliamentary organised bodies of opinion".
Mr Coughlan, a long-time political campaigner who is opposing the Amsterdam Treaty, said yesterday that RTE had gone from one extreme to the other and was now "abdicating from its function of providing proper coverage of the debate on referendum issues".
"This sweeping and unnecessary decision shows timidity and irresponsibility . . . In no way does High Court Justice Paul Carney's judgment require RTE to abandon free, uncontested broadcasts in constitutional referenda altogether."
Mr Coughlan, a senior lecturer in social policy at Trinity College Dublin, said that if RTE finds it so difficult to work out a fair and balanced scheme of free, uncontested broadcasts, it should seek the advice and help of the Referendum Commission. He also called on the Referendum Commission to use the powers he said it had under Section 3 (1) (b) of the Referendum Act to impose a fair scheme on the RTE Authority "in the interest of properly informing the public of the referendum issues".
He said he had written to RTE suggesting that it allocate free broadcasts on an equal time basis to the non-party groups that are wholly concerned with each side in the Amsterdam campaign: The Irish Council for the European Movement on one side and the National Platform group and Peace and Neutrality Alliance on the other. E management is still baffled by the problem it might consider seeking advice from Denmark or other Scandinavian countries where the public broadcasting media are well capable of allocating free broadcasts in a way that holds the balance fairly between the Yes and No sides in referenda, without troubling themselves unduly about the views of the local political party leaderships."
RTE might consider looking at the practice in Scandinavian countries, where public broadcasters were capable of allocating free broadcasts in referendums in a balanced way, he said.