"I must admit that sometimes when I think of television and its immense power I feel somewhat afraid . . . Never before was there in the hands of men an instrument so powerful to influence the thoughts and actions of the multitude," said President ╔amon de Valera on the opening night of Teilif∅s ╔ireann, New Year's Eve, 1961. "[Televison'] can build up the character of the whole people, inducing a sturdiness of vigour and confidence. On the other hand, it can lead through demoralisation to decadence and dissolution," he added.
The launch in Dublin's Gresham Hotel began with Amhrβna bhFiann and included music, poetry, news, benediction and additional ceremonial speeches from Taoiseach Seβn Lemass and the Catholic Primate of All-Ireland, Cardinal John D'Alton. Like Dev, the cardinal sounded a cautionary note, albeit less strident. Lemass, in contrast, was full of optimism about what television could bring. He addressed the Irish people as citizens of the world as well as of Ireland, stressing that there were standards, aims and values that transcended national frontiers and were universal in application.
Thus, the debate between conservative isolationists and modernising integrationists, which had raged primarily in private during the isolationist 1950s, was made irredeemably public. Irish television's first broadcast controversy focused on its own existence and potential.
That controversy has been ongoing ever since. Whether RT╔ has made us more vigorous and confident or decadent and dissolute depends on your perspective. Arguably, television in general, including RT╔, has contributed to making the population more vigorous and confident and more decadent and dissolute. It was never going to result in a simple, "either/or" morality.
It was a largely futile debate anyway. By the late 1950s, more than 30,000 homes in the Republic were receiving the two existing British television channels, BBC and ITV. Television was already beaming in the outside world through, of all horrors for conservatives and nationalists, vigorously pro-British lenses. De Valeran isolationism was thereby doomed. Despite tariff barriers in the realm of economics and censorship laws in the realm of culture, technology was consigning the narrow-gauge, ultra-conservative, nation-building project, begun 40 years earlier, to history.
Now, another 40 years later, aided in significant measure by another de Valera, RT╔, though not quite doomed, is in accelerating decline. While ╔amon de Valera pursued, with almost Talibanic zeal, his isolationist ideal, his grandly-titled granddaughter, the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, S∅le de Valera, is implementing with comparable zeal, the dominant "market-forces" theology of today. The de Valeras, it seems, don't dilute their ideologies. As a result, in 2001, RT╔ television is under-resourced and lacking vigour and confidence. It is also, like the rest of the once vibrant if too often arrogant semi-state sector, demoralised.
The establishment of Irish television didn't dilute the antagonism between competing ideological forces. It did, however, provide a new forum in which those forces would compete. Thus, what came to be known as Ireland's "moral civil war" and indeed, the political civil war in the North, with its overspill to the Republic, Britain and further abroad, provided bitter and vividly remembered clashes. Sex and religion, as well as nationalism and revisionism, produced intense rows which challenged the hitherto raw power of, respectively, the church and the State.
"There was," according to the late Oliver J. Flanagan, "no sex in Ireland before television". There was, though, plenty of nationalism and for a while it continued. Three years after RT╔'s passionately patriotic celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the North erupted. Television news of the black civil rights campaign in the US had provoked Northern liberals to use the same tactics to reform their sectarian state. The reactionary backlash hardened sentiment on all sides and the Provisional IRA, appropriating, inheriting or perverting (depending on your politics) the ideals of 1916, emerged and was shortly banned from the airwaves.
Key battles of the moral civil war were fought on The Late Late Show, which began in 1962 and though both the moral war and the show are still running, there is a tepidness about them now. In its early heyday, however, the show provided a national forum that made public debates that had previously been inaccessible on such a scale. Priests in pulpits denounced many of the talking heads on television but, inexorably, the forces of modernity gradually overcame those of traditionalism as television helped to integrate the Republic with the wider world.
In the process, Irish identity has been transformed even though the price of greater confidence has too often been vacuity and blandness, characteristics increasingly promoted and reflected by television, including RT╔. Dev's inaugural warnings about "decadence and dissolution" seem overstated - especially as members of the ruling political, business and clerical powers have been so heavily represented among the decadent and the dissolute. Perhaps they watched too much television. Yet RT╔, for all its faults, can hardly be blamed for the torrent of crooked practices, embezzlement and paedophilia which cascades all around us.
It can be blamed for its own hubris, of course. Then again, hubris almost inevitably emanates from all monopolies. More crucially, RT╔ has never been immune from political manipulation. Even its opening night champion Seβn Lemass claimed four years later that, as a State broadcasting service, it was "an instrument of public policy" (meaning government policy). RT╔ might confront the power of the Catholic Church but the politicians, especially Fianna Fβil politicians, would always remind the organisation just who was boss. In the early 1970s, FF minister Gerry Collins sacked an RT╔ Authority for having sanctioned an interview with an IRA spokesman.
Less than two decades later, another FF minister, Ray Burke, began the shafting of RT╔ to benefit the private sector - a process continued with vigour and confidence by S∅le de Valera. During the 20 years of Section 31, it was politically manipulated from within as well as controlled from without (by politicians of all the major parties) leaving its journalism on Ireland's biggest news story of the past 30 years - the Northern conflict - effectively castrated.
In fairness, culture on RT╔ television these past 40 years has not been so brutally castrated. Occasionally, it has had splendid highs (some of Seβn ╙ Mordha's documentaries, for instance) and abysmal lows (too many to mention, although the axing of The Spike in 1978, because of a nude scene, and the undiluted awfulness of a number of sitcoms ring down the years). It has staged spectacular, if suspiciously ingratiating, PR-inspired, let's-impress-the-neighbours Eurovision Song Contests, which were far too lavish and expensive for the musical dross they framed.
It has, sometimes, especially during its 1970s teens and perhaps most notably during the heyday of The Riordans, used popular culture to entertain and engage viewers with issues of the day. It has successfully covered sport, regularly bettering the analysis, if not the commentary, of infinitely better-resourced British TV channels. Its drama has ranged from excellent to execrable, as has its talk shows. It has screened, often in advance of British television, many of the more popular US prime-time series.
At its best, it has allowed Irish people to tell their own stories to other Irish people.
Under the 1960 Act, the RT╔ Authority was obliged, in performing its functions, to bear in mind certain "national aims". These were defined, specifically, as "the restoration of the Irish language" and, more ambiguously, as "the preservation and development of the national culture". Like all the State's hollow and generally hypocritical initiatives on the Irish language, television too has failed.
As to the preservation and development of the national culture, the young RT╔ tried but the 40-year-old is a victim, albeit not a guiltless victim, of that culture, which for material benefits and cultural blandness has sold itself. External developments too - most notably the proliferation of TV channels, which has fragmented audiences to the point where many people surf rather than watch television - have made RT╔ less central to Irish life than it once was. Like almost everything else, television has been commodified in the name of market "efficiency". No doubt, there was padding in RT╔ which was parasitic on the public purse. After all, Ray Burke told us so and he should know.
So, as it limps to its 40th birthday in two days' time, RT╔ faces an uncertain future. Despite our paying licence fees, it was never really the people's station anyway. Authoritarian and heavy-handed governments saw to that. Nonetheless, like any such durable enterprise, it has had its hits and misses. On New Year's Eve, 1961, punters spilled from the Gresham Hotel and were shown throwing snowballs at each other.
Equidistant from the founding of the State and the present, it was a pivotal as well as a cold night. Four decades on for RT╔, now that the standards, aims and values of market economics transcend national frontiers and are practically universal in application, the chill looks likely to harden.