On Monday morning RTÉ News led with a story that later that day seven men were to be charged with the attempted armed robbery at Celbridge the previous Friday, notes Vincent Browne
The attempted robbery had got considerable coverage and it had been known from the time of the robbery that the men allegedly caught in the act would be charged. So why the story that later on that day these persons would be charged and brought before a court?
The story later that day about their court appearance was not a story but a preview of an event everybody knew was about to happen. So why was it the lead news item on the morning RTÉ news bulletins?
It wasn't that it was a slow news day and that there had to be a make-it-up story to fill the space. There was an enormous story at hand: the discovery that even more women had been misdiagnosed at Portlaoise hospital and that these had breast cancer and did not know about it.
How could it be that this developing story of huge significance did not make it on to the RTÉ news bulletins ahead of the make-it-up story about men to be charged in court later in the day?
There are a few possible answers to this: the cock-up explanation, which would be acceptable were it believable; and the agenda explanation, which is not acceptable and which is the point of this column.
RTÉ News runs crime stories with a persistence that suggests criminality is an imploding and gravely menacing problem in Irish society. Or rather that a particular facet of criminality - one perceived from a class bias - is an imploding and menacing phenomenon.
A quick perusal of the RTÉ News website confirms the regularity of crime stories, the overall effect of which is vastly to inflate the significance of crime, or rather the crime that interests RTÉ, and drive a political agenda for more and more repressive responses.
Two interviews lately with Brian Lenihan, illustrate the point about a political agenda. The first concerned the deportations of the Roma Gypsies, after they had been forced to live for months on a roundabout in the middle of a busy road.
The thrust of the interview was not about the scandal of forcing human beings, including children, to live in such conditions, but with the "scandal" (not described as such but inferred as such) in the Traveller support group, Pavee Point, giving support to the Roma people.
The other interview was conducted in the last few days and had to do with the issue of bugging the whereabouts of suspected gang members. An amusing offshoot of this was the interviewer apparently being unaware that the bugging of buildings, rooms, pubs, homes and cars has been a feature of Garda operations for decades.
The thrust of the question was why there was not more of this and why the law did not accommodate it . That interview was followed by several other interviews and discussions on news programmes about changing the law to allow into evidence recordings or transcripts of bugged conversations, all got up in the context of a contention that gangland crime and violence was out of hand. The persistent misrepresentation by RTÉ of the crime phenomenon is a serious issue. It propels politicians not (unfortunately) into challenging the basis for the RTÉ portrayal of crime, but into capitulating to that perception of crime and responding with promises or demands for even more repressive responses to this misperception.
To reiterate again (with apologies to those readers who have read me on this theme many times before) crime levels have remained at around the same level for over 20 years now, ranging up and down on a scale between 80,000 and 105,000 crimes per year. But the vast majority of such crimes would not be regarded as very significant: thefts of property worth €200 or less. Violent crime is no worse than it has been over the last 20 years.
In fact violence is far less a feature of this society than it was 15 years ago because of the ending of IRA violence. And of the 53 murders so far this year, less than a quarter derive from gangland criminality.
We have a crime problem: the incidence of sex crimes is of epidemic proportions (this hardly features at all in RTÉ news bulletins, except when the incidence of reported sexual crime increases, which is then wrongly reported as further evidence of increased criminality when, in fact, it may represent a welcome increase in the reporting of such criminality).
There is a serious issue to do with corporate crime - the recent evidence of the theft of between €80 million to €140 million has never been reported as such by the crime sleuths of RTÉ. RTÉ News, along with The Irish Timesand the Irish Independent, effectively sets the public agenda here.
It is a quintessentially political role, an ideological role. And the hysterical over-hyping of crime by RTÉ News, in particular, has a deeply corrosive political effect.