The State broadcaster operates in a culture of secrecy and stifling control of self-critical comment, Bob Quinn asserts
There are superficial reasons why Bertie Ahern intends next April to render the Freedom of Information Act less free and less informative: no government is without blemish; no government can trust its electorate with the unvarnished truth; all governments lie: it is the nature of statecraft. But there are more rooted reasons, buried deep in the paranoid psyche of all bureaucracies and their masters.
The Taoiseach wants to extend - to an unspecified period between five and 30 years - the existing protection for Cabinet deliberations. The most sensitive area which he has invoked, the Northern peace process, is already well protected by the Act. So why?.
Studying the entrails of a Taoiseach's mind is not promising. A more rewarding study may be the thought processes of one of his "instruments of public policy" - RTÉ
On Friday, November 2nd, 2001, I received an RTÉ e-mail not meant for me. It concerned the workings of the FOI Act, was addressed to the highest mandarins in RTÉ, and seemed to me to support the thrust of a critique of the station I had just published. Unfortunately the e-mail came a month too late to be included in my book on the subject, Maverick. Essentially the e-mail said: The game is up, RTÉ; we can no longer obfuscate.
The e-mail was hurriedly followed by another one, this time personal to me, which said: please disregard our previous e-mail. A vestigial remnant of ethics made me observe the request until this moment, when the e-mail has been formally released to me under the Freedom of Information legislation. The memo consists of a confidential RTÉ report on the Information Commission (part of the Ombudsman's Office) and what it thought of RTÉ's implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. Not much, it appears: "We will have to revisit the somewhat restrictive approach we have taken up to now", is how the RTÉ report put it.
RTÉ's first escape clause from the legislation was "Commercially Sensitive Information". The phrase brought back to me the battles I had, as a member of the RTÉ Authority from 1995 to 1999, with corporate RTÉ. The first was when I requested the daily broadcasting log, i.e. the innocuous record of what RTÉ broadcasts publicly.
To my astonishment the request was refused by the director-general on the grounds that it was "commercially sensitive". A brief discussion made it clear how spurious were his grounds for refusal - what RTÉ broadcasts is obviously in the public domain - and I got the logs.
Nevertheless my request was scathingly referred to in the official minutes as "maverick" (hence the title of my book). Then there was the case of RTÉ Authority minutes: I argued that familiarity with previous authority deliberations and decisions might better inform our own, in my opinion, fruitless debates.
The RTÉ executive recoiled in horror and access to previous minutes was denied us. RTÉ Authority minutes are now available to the public and the sky has not fallen.
The confidential e-mail instanced occasions of RTÉ's foot-dragging. "It is clear," it states, "from the operation of the Information Commission's reviewing processes that the assertion that records are commercially sensitive is not acceptable". After four years of the legislation, the clear implication was that RTÉ was still trying it on. Among the items RTÉ refused to disclose on these grounds was its "private" view of An Post's efficiency in collecting the licence fee. But, as the report pointed out, there were no other bidders for the collecting job. There might be a little embarrassment if An Post knew what RTÉ thought of it, but neither body would be commercially damaged by such a disclosure. The report urged that RTÉ could not thus continue to prevaricate.
The second excuse, according to the report, that a public body like RTÉ uses to protect itself from nosey-parkers is "Deliberative Process" - exactly the area about which the Taoiseach now purports to be worried. It means the discussions and ideas that lead to a decision. But the Information Commission, and now the law, make it clear that an exemption on this ground is merely a temporary respite; the process cannot continue indefinitely - and certainly not for some vague period plucked out of the air by a Taoiseach, unless, that is, he changes the law to suit himself. "We may not like this", says the report, " but there is really no alternative". It adds: "We need to adjust to a culture of maximum openness and transparency in all our operations."
It appears RTÉ has partly got its act together. However, the culture of secrecy infects other areas where the organisation is as defensive as ever. I refer to its stifling control of self-critical comment on its own airwaves. In this matter it behaves more like a paranoid private citizen than the biggest and most powerful, the only, public broadcaster in the land. When Maverick was published a politician said to me: "You appear to have offended all the right people".
I realised the full extent of that truth when I saw and heard my book mercilessly attacked and dismissed on a couple of RTÉ TV and radio programmes That was fine by me: if you can't stand the heat, etc. The trouble was that, apart from one assault by Vincent Browne which I enjoyed (I was present), I was otherwise not allowed to discuss or defend myself or my ideas on a single Montrose TV or radio programme and have not been since. A beleaguered Taoiseach and a beleaguered State broadcaster have a lot in common. It is fascinating to observe the coincidence of their reactions to informed criticism. The difference of course is that RTÉ must obey the law. The Taoiseach can change it - if he is allowed.
Bob Quinn is a independent film-maker