April 6th, 1966

FROM THE ARCHIVES:RTÉ's Late Late Showis often credited with shaking up the country in the 1960s, prompting reactions like this. – JOE JOYCE

FOLLOWING AN hour-long discussion about Telefis Eireann and the Late Late Showat Carlow Co. Council it was decided to send a resolution to the Minister and the Director General of T.E. vehemently protesting against attacks on the hierarchy and asking that the show be drastically reformed.

Making the proposal, Councillor Paddy Cogan referred to a personal insult to the Bishop of Galway and said that in his own opinion there was an organised plan to vilify the bishops. He suspected the work of “an advance guard of communism.”

Mr. Cogan said that in all countries where communism had got a hold it had been a similar pattern. The Bishops are the pillars of the Church, he said, and if the pillars are attacked there is danger of the edifice falling.

Three members of the hierarchy had been referred to in one programme of the Late Late Show, said Mr. Cogan, and the next week the man who made the attack should have been excluded from the programme. If he had spoken in the Dail he would have been ordered out.

Instead he had been brought back on the pretext that he was going to apologise. The apology he did make was a qualified one and he also said he doubted if the Bishop knew the meaning of Christianity.

While article 40 of the Constitution, said Mr. Cogan, protected free speech it also protected people from abuse in the Press, and on Radio and T.V. He felt that the Late Late Showshould be taken off the air.

Councillor Bill Nolan said the compere [Gay Byrne] was insulting his own intelligence by saying that the kind of “free speech” heard on that particular edition of the Show was the kind the men of 1916 died for. If there is to be a balanced discussion, he said, there should be a balanced panel.

Councillor Brendan Little said it was the business of the Council to object against scurrility, anti-clericalism and blatant attacks on the Catholic Church.

Generally speaking, he said, what is offered for entertainment on radio, television and in films and the theatre in this country is indifferent and third rate but it was not the function of the Council to protest at that level. This, however, was different.

He decried the lack of effort to get across the real national image and said that our television image at present is a pale reflection of the worst of the B.B.C.

Councillor Kathleen Brady-O’Neill said the councillors were being hypocritical. If anyone said anything out of the ordinary they were immediately branded as a communist. I am a good Catholic and no Communist, she said, and I want that understood. I do not condone any personal insult to the Bishop of Galway, she continued, but we must not be too sweeping in our condemnation.

The chairman, Mr. Des Governey T.D. said it was obvious that all were basically in agreement.