The Irish people have the courts, and not the politicians, to thank for establishing standards of fairness in conducting constitutional referendums, the former secretary of the Campaign for Fair Referenda said yesterday.
Mr Anthony Coughlan welcomed the High Court finding that aspects of RTE's coverage of the 1995 divorce referendum were constitutionally unfair as "a small victory for democracy over the big parties, who have abused the airwaves in successive constitutional referenda.
"This judgment helps get the political parties, and especially their leaderships, off the backs of RTE and the rest of the broadcasting media," he said.
Mr Coughlan was speaking after the High Court ruled in his favour in proceedings taken against RTE, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, and the Attorney General challenging aspects of RTE's coverage of the 1995 poll.
Ms Patricia McKenna MEP, who previously successfully challenged the use of public money to advocate one side of the argument in a referendum, attended the court hearing.
"As in the Crotty case, the McKenna case, and now in this, the Irish public have the judiciary, not the politicians, to thank for vindicating the law and the Constitution and establishing standards of fairness in conducting constitutional referendums which are appropriate to a mature democracy," Mr Coughlan said.
It was good that the law had been clarified on the matter of free political party broadcasts in referendums, but it was regrettable that it took a 15 month process of complaint to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, followed by a five-day High Court hearing, to establish "what any unbiased reading of the Broadcasting Acts should have made clear" - namely, that RTE should not give the larger political parties free broadcasts in a referendum so as to produce a one-sided effect, when it is the people, not the politicians, who are legislating on these occasions.
He said the political parties, which are not even mentioned in the Constitution, have no formal function in the referendum process, once a majority in the Oireachtas has put a Referendum Bill before the people.
The political parties' views could be "quite adequately" covered in RTE's current affairs programmes where fairness and balance were statutorily required, without getting the unfair advantage of having a line-up of free broadcasts night after night before referendum day, when they are all mainly aligned on one side.
He said that, over the years, the leaders of the Republic's big political parties have played "ducks and drakes" with the rights of citizens, especially in matters having to do with Europe. He noted a referendum was held on the Single European Act in 1987 only after Mr Raymond Crotty took a court case.
The larger Oireachtas parties had then decided to use taxpayers' money to get the referendum results they wanted by unconstitutionally spending huge sums of money to secure the ratification of the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, he said.
Mr Coughlan said that when the Supreme Court found, in the McKenna case, that it was unconstitutional to spend public money to obtain a particular result in a referendum, the party leaders had "seized the airwaves, with the co-operation of RTE" to give a total of 43 minutes' free broadcasting time for the Yes side as against 10 minutes for the No side, in the week leading up to the November 1995 divorce referendum.
"More recently, like the leaders of some banana republic, the same party leaders have given in to the wishes of the EU Commission in Brussels to hold Ireland's Amsterdam referendum on May 22nd, in order to put pressure on the Danish people, who have their referendum on May 28th, to vote Yes as Brussels expects Irish voters to do."
He said that next week, the party leaders "will cheer collectively as the Government signs up to abolish the national currency, irreversibly and in principle forever, thereby drawing a new economic partition across Ireland, effectively kicking the people of Northern Ireland, both unionist and nationalist, in the teeth, and negating many of the possibilities for closer North-South co-operation which could have been opened up by the Good Friday Agreement.
"It shows a consistent pattern of chicanery and national surrender, with the government and so-called `Opposition' hand in glove on all major matters, while pretending to squabble fiercely over minor ones."
