Free speech is good, but for what?

WHEN a politician of Maire Geoghegan Quinn's stature decides to leave public life and cites media intrusion into her private life as the principle reason, she challenges assumptions about the role of the media in a democratic society. When that politician has herself helped to redefine the difference between the public and the private, as Maire Geoghegan Quinn did when she reformed the laws on homosexuality, those questions are all the more urgent.

They are not, of course, simple questions, and it is worth remembering that the first significant invasion of a politician's private life here was effected by some of Moire Geoghegan Quinn's close political allies when they made Bertie Ahern's marital status an issue in the contest between himself and Albert Reynolds for the Fianna Fail leadership. But one wrong doesn't excuse another.

One of the assumptions of political liberalism is that freedom of speech is a value in itself, even when the content of that speech is objectionable. In the US at the moment, for instance, one of the current hit movies, The People vs Larry Flynt, is, by all accounts, an unabashed celebration of the legal vindication of a cynical pornographer. The eponymous hero is the publisher of Hustler magazine, who fought off attempts by the Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell to sue him for invading his privacy and causing him emotional distress in a gross, obscene and libellous article.

That someone like Flynt can be painted as a popular hero gives some indication of how deeply rooted is the idea of "free speech" as an obvious good in itself.

Readers will not be surprised to learn that I, too, think free speech is a good idea. But what is it good for? Its function surely is to keep open what might be called the public realm and, in a democracy, to keep it open on as equal a basis as possible to as many citizens as possible. When, as in the case of Ma ire Geoghegan Quinn, the exercise of free speech seems to be narrowing the public realm by removing a vigorous and courageous contributor to public debate, we have to rethink its meaning. If free speech ends up creating silence, is it any good at all?

And it is not just individual public figures who are affected by these concerns. A fortnight ago, for instance, the Sunday Independent decided to attack a whole group of women in the public realm - female cabin crew on Aer Lingus transatlantic flights. These women have been in the news because they are threatening industrial action over their belief that the hotel the company houses them in is in an unsafe area of New York.

THE Sunday Independent, in an article by John Smith, attacked these workers, not on the merits or otherwise of their case, but through a series of innuendos about their private lives, sexuality and physical appearance. The article opened with: "I see the Aer Lingus chicks won't stay in a hotel because there were 18 rapes and five murders in the area last year. So there is obviously no point in me inviting them back to my suite for a late night cup of cocoa."

Moving through nudge nudge, wink wink references to "bottle blonds" and "paper thin walls", it dismissed their concerns as the result of too much time spent "gossiping about what Jennifer got up to with the Lufthansa hunk".

Apart from proving that inane sexism and pathetic fantasy are alive and well and living in Abbey Street, what was the point of this piece? Was it an exercise of free speech or, on the contrary, a denial of free speech, an attempt to ridicule and intimidate a group of women into silence? It had no purpose other than to degrade and belittle the women by defining their free speech as the gossipy tittle tattle of "chicks" whose only legitimate existence is sexual.

(Almost exactly the same thing was done by the Sunday World a few years when it decided to define women bus conductors as "randy clippies".)

In a manoeuvre that comes very close to the Victorian habit of regarding women who appear in public as whores, a public issue - industrial relations in a state company - was recast so as to take on the private shape of one man's pitifully cliched sexual fantasies.

The misuse of free speech that makes a politician decide to quit public life or that effectively denies to others the rights it claims for itself is notoriously difficult to deal with through the law. The classic liberal position, as defined by the US Supreme Court in its rulings since the famous New York Times vs Sullivan case in 1964, is one which effectively concludes that abuse is the price of freedom. It holds that the Sunday Independent's right to demean and bully the Aer Lingus women is an inevitable corollary of, for instance, the public's right to read Ulysses.

But this is paradoxical - on the one side it aims to keep the public realm open to all; on the other, it allows those with the power to do so to erect barriers of prejudice, hatred and insult that keep some people out. And in legal terms, the paradox may be inescapable. Nobody has yet managed to formulate a legal principle sufficiently sensitive to allow the obnoxious their legitimate place in the public realm while preventing their obnoxiousness from keeping others out.

Any conceivable law, when applied in practical circumstances, is bound to be either too tight or too loose. How do you defend the Sunday In dependent's legitimate right to oppose with vigour the demands of Aer Lingus workers while preventing it from abusing and insulting those same women? How do you draft a privacy law that would protect Maire Geoghegan Quinn's son but not allow Michael Lowry to evade legitimate questions about his house extension?

BUT the problem is, in any case, more social than legal. What we are experiencing is just one of the consequences of the breakdown of consensus in Irish society.

Newspapers used to refrain from making any comment on the private lives of politicians, not because the law prevented it, but because there was a tacit consensus that it would be wrong to do so. More profoundly, the consensus about what is or is not offensive has fallen apart, so that one Irish person's fair comment is another's foul mouthed outrage.

In that context, all the State can do is sharpen the distinction between what is private and what is public. On the one hand, this means making the provisions of the Equality Bill universal, establishing for the first time the principle that the private lives of all workers - including those in church owned institutions - should not be a basis for discrimination in their jobs. On the other, it means, rather paradoxically, recognising and protecting the media's legitimate role in the public realm.

The freedom to speak and write on genuine public issues would, at the very least, take away any excuse for trespassing on the precious domain of privacy.