GRIT AND GRAVITAS

SINCE I was appointed Chairperson of the Independent Radio and Television Commission, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to keep that role separate from my involvement in Hot Press. What I do at the IRTC has not been and will not be exploited in any way in the interest of Hot Press– or vice versa.

However, my own resolve in this regard becomes irrelevant when my work with Hot Press is used as a basis to attack my suitability for the job I have to do with the IRTC. In the Sunday Times of 23rd January, Eoghan Harris wrote a piece, ostensibly about the Interim Guidelines issued by the IRTC to assist independent radio stations in dealing with the broadcasting issues arising from the government’ decision not to renew the Order under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, which prohibited interviews with members of Sinn Féin, among others. We have reproduced the text of this piece here, both for the historical record, and to put the reply – also published here – in context.

I believe – and indeed I was advised – that what the Sunday Times had published was defamatory in the extreme. However, rather than immediately issuing a writ, I spoke to one of the editors involved, the Irish news editor Ian Birrell. I explained that while the article was wildly inaccurate and misleading in many respects, and highly libellous, I would be prepared to withhold legal action pending agreement on the part of the Sunday Times to facilitate a right to reply. I did this in the context of the preference – expressed somewhat ironically in the circumstances in the Interim Guidelines issued by the IRTC – for post-facto rebuttal over prior restraint or censorship. However, there is no way that even the most passionate commitment to the ideals of freedom of speech and freedom of communication can be taken as an endorsement of a wilful desire to lie, distort and misrepresent . . .

I submitted my reply to the Sunday Times to run in their issue of February 6th. I was told that it was too long and I agreed to cuts to bring it down to 2,350 words. Again I was told that it was too long and Ian Birrell edited the reply down to 1,000 words, emasculating it completely and producing something in the process that was a travesty of a right to reply, eliminating as it did my criticisms of the Sunday Times, as well as an examination of Eoghan Harris’ credentials – both of which I believe are essential to an effective rebuttal of the original article’s allegations.

In the end, the Sunday Times refused to publish my reply to Eoghan Harris’ piece. In a letter dated 11th February, Ian Birrell stated that “as a national and family newspaper, we are bound by constraints of taste, law and size.” And in further correspondence, dated February 18th, the Ireland editor Alan Ruddock, attempted to portray a suggestion that the Sunday Times would be willing to publish a response of similar length to the original article – which “would of course be subject to our normal editorial criteria and would have to be approved by our lawyers” – as a ‘generous’ response.

My own view is very different: I believe that to offer a ‘right to reply’ and then to seek to remove from it criticisms of the Sunday Times and an examination of Eoghan Harris’ own credentials is not to offer a right of reply at all. Indeed it is to engage in a pretence which – as I said in a letter to the Sunday Times – I do not believe will carry any weight if this issue comes to trial.

In the context of the Sunday Times’ refusal to afford me the space necessary to vindicate my reputation, I am left with no option but to deal with the matter through the appropriate legal channels. Given the inevitability that the longer something like this goes unanswered the greater the extent to which the allegations will cling, I feel that it is essential to use the forum of Hot Press to engage in what is specifically a damage limitation exercise, and to challenge effectively Eoghan Harris’ credibility on issues of this kind.

Here then are the pieces: Eoghan Harris’ original and my own edited reply, slightly longer than the 2,350 words which I was willing to allow the Sunday Times to cut it to.

But then, what’s a few words between friends?

• Niall Stokes

Editor of Hot Press and Chairperson of the IRTC

Original Hot Press Spread - February 1994

The Sunday Times published an article under the headline SHERIFF STOKES GOES SOFT ON THE GUNMEN two weeks ago. The article purported to be about the interim guidelines issued by the Independent Radio and Television Commission following the so-called ‘lifting’ of Section 31. But it wasn’t, because it couldn’t have been: Eoghan Harris had not read the guidelines when he wrote the piece. I know because it was blatantly obvious to me when I read the article and so I phoned him and asked. He told me that he had read the report in the Irish Times. And so, I asked him again had he read the guidelines themselves and he admitted, somewhat cravenly, that he hadn’t.

In going into print without having read the guidelines, Eoghan Harris was guilty of a gross dereliction of his responsibility to the readers of the Sunday Times. He was also guilty of distorting and misrepresenting the position of the Commission, and my own position in particular. I am not sure whether this slovenly and unprofessional behaviour happened as a result of arrogance or mere laziness, but it hardly matters – the effect was the same.

Certainly the number of lies and distortions contained in the piece overall suggest a level of sheer malice. There is the implication throughout that Eoghan Harris knows me well, that he has some kind of inside track on my relationship with Michael D. Higgins and that he is an expert on Hot Press magazine, of which I am the editor. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have met twice, and on neither occasion did I say anything which would have given Eoghan Harris even the remotest insight into either my professional or my personal life. To be blunt he knows nothing about me.

The sly implication of an insider’s knowledge – “Stokes and Higgins have an almost father-son relationship,” he says absurdly at one point – is consistent with an insidious attempt to slither around issues of defamation. But, the allegations contained in the article are of an extremely serious nature nonetheless: that as editor of Hot Press I have colluded with gunmen, specifically the Provisional IRA; that in my professional life and my personal life, I am incapable of making moral choices; that I am so childish, irresponsible and unwilling to confront moral issues that I impose the burden of resolving them on junior staff; that I am in receipt of the benefit of a Mercedes supplied by the State and that I use it recklessly; and that, on the basis of all these failures I am unfit to be the Chairperson of the IRTC or the editor of Hot Press.

To support his attack, Eoghan Harris tells a series of lies. He says that Gerry Adams has gazed from the cover of Hot Press more often than Sinéad O’Connor. In fact, Sinead has been the subject of five cover stories in Hot Press and Gerry Adams one. He implies that Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA have not been subjected to criticism in Hot Press and that in effect the Hot Press editorial line would be to support the so-called armed struggle. The truth is that as editor I have consistently and repeatedly condemned the IRA’s campaign of violence and murder; in the Whole Hog column which covers political, social and environmental developments every fortnight the IRA have been excoriated on countless occasions and Sinn Féin with them; Bill Graham, one of our senior writers, has consistently opposed the IRA and Sinn Fein in pieces published in Hot Press.

Eamonn McCann has presented a perspective on Sinn Féin and the IRA in his column in Hot Press which refuses to toe the cosy consensus line established between Dublin and London by emphasising the conditions underpinning the very significant support which both the IRA and their political affiliates enjoy among the Nationalist community. But, he has also been extremely critical of the Republican movement, of Gerry Adams, of Sinn Féin and of the IRA.

“Hot Press under his editorship was a paper for the politically correct,” Eoghan Harris moans, “for insiders pretending to be outsiders, for reporters who, metaphorically speaking, were prepared to lie down with the gunmen.” Did anyone think about this nonsense before it went into print? Look at it again. To begin with, there is a clear suggestion that I am no longer the editor of Hot Press – Eoghan Harris presumably has visions of me riding around in his mythical state car and picking up a fat salary and the thought of it corrodes his miserable gut. But, the reality is that the post of Chairperson of the IRTC earns me £3,000 per annum, which is then taxed at the normal rate. There is no car and I am still editor of Hot Press.

Now, I don’t know who stuck the phrase “metaphorically speaking” into the snatch quoted above, but whoever it was must have a very low opinion of Sunday Times readers. It is perfectly obvious that “to lie down with gunmen” is a metaphor unless Eoghan Harris, or the sub-editor responsible or the legal advisor responsible imagined that readers would take it to mean that our reporters were involved in sexual relationships with gunmen.

Alternatively, someone may have put the phrase in thinking that it blurred the defamation effectively. It doesn’t. The meaning of the metaphor “to lie down with gunmen” is perfectly clear: it means to collude with them towards the realisation of shared aims. Coupled with the suggestion in the same sentence that we are “insiders pretending to be outsiders” there is a definite line implying Eoghan Harris knows that some of our reporters in fact are members of illegal organisations, or as close to it as makes no difference.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. This is the kind of insinuation which can earn someone a bullet in the head and Eoghan Harris knows it. It is of course an absurd suggestion, pathetically so. And it probably wasn’t intended, being more likely the sloppily constructed product of Eoghan Harris’ feverishly paranoid view of the world.

We have interviewed Gerry Adams for Hot Press, and Martin McGuinness and Danny Morrison. As well as John Hume, Seamus Mallon, John Cushnahan when he was leader of the Alliance Party, Harold McCusker when he was alive, John McMichael of the UDA when he was alive, Ken Maginnis, Sammy Wilson, Andy Tyrie, Peter Robinson, the Reverend Martin Smyth and Ken Kerr, also of the UDA.

Any suggestion that we are sectarian in our approach to these subjects is a contemptible distortion of the truth. If there is an agenda to Hot Press’ coverage of the Northern conflict it is to force politicians and the people they represent to confront the ultimate logic of their positions in interviews, whatever side of the divide they’re on. It is to get their points of view down on paper in detail and at length so that they can be better understood by those for whom they are the traditional enemy. And ultimately, from my own personal point of view, it is to contribute whatever I can to creating the conditions where working class people might find common cause across the sectarian divide, unite in refusing to be cannon fodder for any armed organisation and instead fight together to transform the society in which they live, economically, socially and politically.

It is all there, on the record, if anyone had bothered to look – including the fact that it was following an interview with Gerry Adams in Hot Press that John Hume first made contact with the leader of Sinn Féin some years ago, beginning a process that would ultimately lead to the current round of talks between Sinn Féin and the SDLP, the Hume-Adams document and finally the Joint Declaration which Eoghan Harris himself compared (ludicrously, but never mind) to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The guidelines issued by the IRTC are also on the record. If Eoghan Harris had read them he’d have seen that the responsibility for what goes out on Irish independent radio is placed where it must rest – with the programme controllers and chief executives of the individual stations. The heavy burden of responsibility which these people carry in being given a licence to broadcast in the first place is underlined by repeated references to the laws of the land under which they must operate including the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, the Offences Against the State Act, the Defamation Act, the entire body of criminal law and the law of contempt of court.

The principle of extreme caution and the importance of acting in a responsible manner where matters of sensitivity are concerned are very clearly and forcefully stated. And it is in this context that I said to the Irish Times that I did not want a situation where “a young journalist working on a report could be blamed for any breach.” Far from handing the moral choices over to juniors, the buck stops at the top. And that is the principle I have always applied at Hot Press, taking full responsibility for everything that has been written in the paper, dealing with difficult moral decisions every time we publish, on the big issues doing not what is expedient but what I believe in, and never once selling out a journalist who has made a mistake or making anyone else pay for any lack of vigilance on my part. To imply otherwise, as Eoghan Harris does, from a position of complete ignorance, is the height of presumptuousness and arrogance.

But then this is symptomatic of those who introduced and advocated the continuation of Section 31. Conor Cruise O’Brien who extended the order to cover spokespeople for Sinn Féin in 1976 justified the fact that they were banned from appearing on broadcast media but not in the press with the infamous line that ‘a lower class of person listens to radio.’ This is the kind of condescending view of people and of the world that fuels the censorship mentality. Conor Cruise O’Brien knew best. Eoghan Harris knows best. And the concept of good authority he has latched onto since his break from the Stalinist tradition is in fact merely the same kind of thinking dressed up in a different set of flimsy threads, authoritarianism with a crazy fixed grin. I will dictate what you can see, hear, feel and do because I, Mr. Good Authority, am intellectually and morally superior to you mere plebs.

This kind of attitude disempowers and ultimately alienates people. It promotes an atmosphere of fear and self-censorship. It stifles debate and restricts the flow of vital information. And that precisely was the effect of Section 31, which promoted a profound ignorance in the South about the dynamics of the conflict in the North, as well as contributing further to the ghettoisation of people of the nationalist tradition. And, far from doing anything to deflect the Provisionals from their violent course, it gave grist to their argument that the armed struggle was the only way that nationalist people could make their voices heard effectively.

It also gave rise to a transparently crazy situation where George Bush could nightly be seen rationalising the massacre of hundreds, even thousands of defenceless Iraqis, Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic could justify the genocide of Bosnian Muslims and the existence of concentration camps and on a more farcical level Lorena Bobbit could explain why she had cut off her husband’s penis (talk about incitement to violence!) – and Gerry Adams was being kept off the television!

Me, I believe that the presumption in a democracy is, as it says in the statement of principles which forms part of the IRTC guidelines, “that the viewers or listeners can decide responsibly how they should respond to what is said via the media in general and the broadcast media in particular.” And again, also from the statement of principles: “Freedom of speech is an essential democratic right, and while it is not absolute, the conditions of permissible interference with this right by the State should be interpreted with caution.”

Eoghan Harris accuses me of sharing with Michael D. Higgins an interest in soft options. Where Michael D. Higgins is concerned the statement doesn’t stand up to a minute’s scrutiny in terms of his record as a Minister – only a clown would suggest, for example, that the decision to put Teilefís na Gaeilge on the air after decades of promises is the soft option. As far as the lifting of Section 31 is concerned, the soft option for the IRTC would have been to follow the model of the RTE guidelines. Instead we exercised great care and invested considerable time and thought in producing what we believe is a valuable document, aimed at both protecting the fundamental rights involved and contributing to an atmosphere in which a cessation of violence can be brought about with the minimum of obfuscation and delay. And I will stand over the guidelines we produced as the right response to the prevailing circumstances, morally, politically, tactically and legally.

Eoghan Harris attempts to impugn my integrity in coming to that decision. Perhaps, however, it is his own which needs to be put under the microscope. Harris was a member of Sinn Féin in the late 60’s. He went with Sinn Féin the Workers Party in the split with the Provisionals, but old sores may still fester from the bloody conflict which arose, as the Official IRA, the Provisionals and then the INLA became involved in internecine feuds.

He was a member of the Workers Party when it consorted with brutal and now discredited dictatorships in the Soviet Union, in Romania, in East Germany and in North Korea and he issued not a squeak in protest. He was a member also when the paramilitary wing of the Workers Party planted the bomb in Aldershot on February 22, 1972 which killed seven people. And when they murdered Ranger Best in cold blood, in Derry, on May 25th, 1972. And when they gunned down Seamus Costello of the Irish Republican Socialist Party in Dublin on October 5th, 1977. Where was his good authority and his expert witness then?

I find it curious that he insists about the Provisionals, that there is no distinction between the political wing and the military wing, between Sinn Féin and the IRA. Perhaps he argues this so forcefully because that was his own experience of the relationship between the Official IRA and the Workers Party. Fortunately, I have no such experience to draw on.

Good authority. Expert witness. More like bad conscience, inspiring an illogical, unprofessional, irresponsible and entirely hypocritical pack of lies, distortions, smears and misrepresentations. As you might imagine the script yourself, Sheriff Stokes says: Goodnight Eoghan Harris.

Goodnight.