Kathy Sheridan: The judge who protested on behalf of the TV licence refuseniks

A social history of TV licence dissidents and their battle for justice has yet to be written, which is a pity.

Back in 2005 a solicitor used his day in court to challenge a TV licence inspector who claimed he spotted the television through the lawyer’s front window as he walked up the garden path one November night. The solicitor protested that he had neither a garden path nor a front window so the inspector couldn’t possibly have seen a television. Eventually the solicitor admitted that he did indeed have a television but it was in a basement where the inspector couldn’t possibly have seen it. He was fined €155 anyway.

In 2007, a 69-year-old Killarney man appeared in court for refusing to pay the licence for nearly 25 years, claiming that RTÉ had violated his human rights back in 1984. Richard Behal said that because of Section 31 of the Broadcast Act, RTÉ had excluded him as a Sinn Féin candidate from a political programme. The judge rejected this interesting argument and fined him €300 (plus €90 costs) for having a colour TV without a licence. That came two years after Behal had been jailed for failing to pay a previous fine for a similar offence.

In 2003, Judge Conal Gibbons slapped the maximum fine of €634 plus €15 costs on scores of people who failed to appear at Dublin District Court to explain themselves.

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By contrast, Judge Anthony Halpin took the road less travelled a few weeks ago, when 159 people were summonsed before the special weekly sitting of the An Post TV licence District Court in the Four Courts. The judge said that those who made an arrangement to pay the fee would be left without a conviction, but that he had to convict those who did not turn up. For these he imposed a fine of €150 plus €100 costs.

During a week when a Martian might have concluded that Ryan Tubridy had sacrificed a child in a terminally confusing barter deal on Killiney Hill on Midsummer’s Eve, Judge Halpin delivered a less than calming preamble. It was more of a fiery speech from the dock than the words of a judge on the bench presiding over people who may or may not have been struggling with the cost of living when the TV licence came due. (An Post/RTÉ are not wholly evil: some 43 per cent of the TV licence database is made up of households that avail of free TV licences or have no TV set).

Judge Halpin’s audience could hardly have been withholding payment in protest against RTÉ’s side-deals because they wouldn’t have known about them way back when the inspector called. Still, the judge did a remarkable job of doing their protesting for them, hammering the plaintiff (RTÉ) by lobbing in words such as “elitism”, “exclusivity”, “ruling class” and “freeloaders”.

Anticipating that the people before him might be feeling “a little hard done by when they see the way RTÉ has abused statutory funding”, he proceeded to pour oil on the flames. Railing against “the revelations [that have] rocked the very foundations of the national public broadcaster and have sent, not ripples, but seismic shock waves throughout the organisation”, he said he was “appalled and disgusted that such clandestine, secretive and dubious goings-on would be the order of the day in respect of arrangements between RTÉ and the Godlike personalities who seem to be above scrutiny”.

A few literary quotes were thrown in, including the old Shakespearean reliable, “There is something rotten in the State of Denmark”, which usually feature when regicide, fratricide and suicide are in the mix. The judge used it to describe the “shenanigans and mischievous activities that have gone on in RTÉ”.

Orwell got a look-in too. Short of lifetime Dáil membership awards, the relevant Oireachtas Committee members achieved the next best thing. They found themselves in the same paragraph as George Orwell. In this telling, with “their difficult and gruelling task in getting to the truth”, with their “diligent and assiduous examination”, they were up against Squealer, “the pig who was Comrade Napoleon’s propaganda machine [in Animal Farm, who] abuses language by whatever means necessary in twisting and distorting rhetoric so as to justify behaviour”.

The question is not whether the judge was right or wrong to make the speech. Eminent judges such as Paul Carney and Peter Kelly made many powerful and important interventions in their careers. Judge Halpin’s scepticism about the criminalisation of people convicted of failing to pay the TV licence is well-founded; many compliant licence-payers would agree with him.

The question is whether it is wise for any judge to turn the week’s headlines into a rallying cry for accused people standing before him in court. Venting about a semistate whose accounts are under forensic investigation hardly seems the wisest route to guide people towards complying with the law in general.

[ ‘I am proud to work at RTÉ — but something precious has been broken’ ]

There was no shortage of incendiary news and commentary for licence refuseniks who wanted to vent and vindicate their position that week. They were all over social media. The judge was preaching to the converted since those before him hadn’t paid up anyway, allegedly.

Apart from that, a judge’s conflation of Squealer, the propaganda cog, with RTÉ, without distinguishing between its excellent journalism and the infuriating prevarication of some managers, is hardly conducive to the survival of a vitally important element of a healthy democracy.

Until the people we have entrusted with those decisions come up with another way of funding it, Judge Halpin and the rest of us are stuck with the TV licence. Like it or not, that’s the law, for now.