Section 31 By The Back Door.

In Blog, Politicsby Fedayn1 Comment

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Above: A photo from An Phoblacht depicting a demonstration against censorship and a new video from Sinn Féin about RTE’s latest silencing shenanigans.


 

Ireland’s second (or third in some polls) largest party has claimed the national broadcaster is censoring them from access to the airwaves.

On the party’s Facebook page the video (above) is described:

Over the past 2 days RTÉ news has refused to broadcast their interviews with Gerry Adams or cover our daily press conferences. Today Gerry met with Circle of Hope, a suicide awareness and prevention group, and visited a family centre in Togher. Watch this video to see what RTÉ refused to broadcast.

It is widely accepted that Irish media colludes with the establishment to attack Sinn Féin on any given issue. Recently, following a drug war murder which took place in front of crime correspondents at a Boxing weigh in the media didn’t criticise the Gardaí for abandoning the event to a known, real assassination threat nor did the media attack the Govt. for closing the local Garda station, they launched a very odd attack on Sinn Féin, demanding Gerry Adams identify AK47s from photographs.

The ongoing critical coverage of the Shinners is grand of course, freedom of speech and balance etc etc. However, RTÉ is claiming that everytime it casts aspersions on the Shinners – whether it’s over non-jury courts, ‘known’ associates or drug gangs they have nothing at all to do with – these valuable air minutes are counted as ‘Sinn Féin time’ in their electoral ledger. The Shinners are challenging this, but it may be too late to do anything before the election.

Section 31 was the legislation used to prevent the thickos in the Republic from bad influences such as hearing actual Republicans on telly. The actor Stephen Rea would dub gerry Adams voice much to the amusement of the rest of the world, Michael D. Higgins repealed Section 31 in 1992. Nowadays it’s all goat selfies and naked trampolining.

Hard to believe this classic from Steve Coogan is almost 25 years old.

Comments

  1. The dubbing only happened on UK TV due to the efforts of the Nuj to circumnavigate rules they saw as clearly wrong. RTE went above and beyond section 31 gleefully censoring republicans even when not speaking for the republican movement.

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