Politicians have given away their powers, school is told

Politicians have handed over power to the regulatory authorities they created rather than making decisions themselves, the Humbert International School has been told.

Ms Rosemary Steen, public affairs manager with Enterprise Energy, developer of the Corrib gas field, said 15 new regulatory authorities had been created, including energy, aviation and rail procurement, along with some 500 quasi-regulators in the State.

Politicians blamed society for undermining their role, "but it's the politicians' fault". Regulators were "unelected and often unaccountable" and when members of the public went to their public representatives about roads or other issues, politicians told them they had to go somewhere else to put their case.

Ms Steen also criticised political parties for moving from a "bottom-up" approach, where the local party picked the candidates, to "top-down" political management.

When politicians appeared on such programmes as RTE's Questions & Answers, their answers were all carefully structured and prepared, contributing to people's view that politicians did not have the power to decide on issues that really concerned them. Ms Steen was speaking at a session on "Politics and the Media".

Mr Joe Mulholland, former controller of programmes at RTE, called for the establishment of an independent press complaints commission and said media studies should be an essential part of the school curriculum.

He said the Irish media had not reached the same excesses as the British press, but there was increasing commercial pressure, and journalists should have minimum standards.

The former editor of the Irish Press, Mr Tim Pat Coogan, sharply criticised the media, including The Irish Times, which he described as "fat, self-opinionated and conscious of its own self-importance" and more interested in opinions than hard news.

He also criticised Independent Newspapers as self-satisfied and opinionated, adding that readers of its papers would find no analysis about Eircom, its "lousy service" and its takeover.

Mr Coogan said Irish media were at the stage of working out two forms of colonialism, "Mother England and Mother Church", and he believed the advent of the Irish Examiner on the national stage "breaks up the national consensus".

There had been criticism of the coverage given to tribunals, but he believed "the mills of God might grind slowly but they do grind", and the tribunals were contributing to that.

He pointed out that six out of 10 newspapers in Ireland were printed in England and that made it important that "we support our own and that we in the media have certain standards of journalism".

He said RTE had been affected by successive governments and should feel "very afraid" now. But it also had self-inflicted wounds, such as its soft-pedalling in its approach to the unionist community compared to Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act "let us down", and the best coverage of the North had been by English journalists.

Mr John Downing, political correspondent of the Irish Examiner, said: "The country is bristling with political activism but it is not within the political parties."

This hidden political Ireland went about its business "under the noses of the politicians". These groups used the media as the media used them, and the press needed to go back to the a-b-c of reporting in critical appraisal.