Party leaders should not inflict their conference speeches - the white elephants of RTÉ's schedules - on the public in prime television time, writes John Horgan.
RTÉ has taken the initial steps towards potentially radical change in the area of political broadcasting by approaching the political parties to discuss changes in the way that party conferences have traditionally been covered.
A Machiavellian analysis might suggest that now - when RTÉ is anxiously awaiting a decision on a licence fee increase - is a canny time for the national broadcaster to flex some of its few remaining muscles. Equally, it could be regarded as a risky initiative for precisely the same reason.
Either way, the time for a hard look at this white elephant of the schedules is long overdue. The present format, in which pre-determined segments of each party's conference are covered live and the party leader's speech is given prime time billing (although Labour agreed to an earlier time-slot at its last conference) is effectively the offspring of decades of wrangling.
In the early days of RTÉ television, the politicians thought that they should control every aspect of political broadcasting and made strenuous efforts to do so, just as RTÉ kept on trying to extend the boundaries of the areas within which the programme-makers had the upper hand.
It was quite some time before the political establishment finally accepted that there was a difference between party political broadcasts and current affairs broadcasting on political topics, despite the fact that the distinction is clear in the founding legislation.
Even then, there were ongoing wrangles about who should choose the politicians to participate in current affairs or news broadcasts - the producers or the party whips - and there were occasions on which a government could and did, effectively veto a programme by refusing to nominate any spokesperson, as happened during the battle between Mr Haughey as Minister for Agriculture and the farmers in the mid-1960s.
The echoes of these battles have not completely died away and probably never will, but the question of broadcasting the party conferences will generate a considerable amount of sabre-rattling, precisely because this is now one of the few areas in which the political parties, by and large, still exercise almost total control of the agenda of public service broadcasting.
The political parties maintain that these broadcasts are, in effect, virtually the only occasions when they can present themselves to the electorate without the intervention (meddlesome and mischievous, as they privately believe) of the journalistic profession. It is, they argue, an exercise in direct democracy and therefore a prime function of public service broadcasting.
RTÉ does not dismiss this argument, but is increasingly concerned about the fact that this particular expression of public service broadcasting tends to take place at a time when most of its rivals are showing programmes that command far higher audiences. The issue is not the programming, at least not primarily, but the scheduling.
RTÉ's concern is entirely legitimate, but this is not because the broadcasting of politics or even of party conferences is boring in itself. In the 1970s, when Fianna Fáil was riven by the arms trial and Labour by the question of coalition, party conferences were often lively and sometimes highly dramatic.
What has happened since then is that the media managers and spin doctors have taken over to the extent that, with very few exceptions, political parties actually don't have conferences any more: they have rallies.
Rallies are boring, on television, on radio or in print - which is why broadcasting them at peak viewing time is now an insult to our collective intelligence.
If the political parties continue to insist that their leaders' speeches continue to be broadcast in full, they will have to accept that these should not be inflicted on the public at prime time.
Some political leaders may even be secretly a little relieved: for all of them, it is an extraordinary ordeal and sometimes of very questionable political value. And things can go suddenly, disastrously wrong, with no opportunity of rewinding the tape.
I have a vivid memory of sitting behind Brendan Corish at one Labour Party Conference and watching him sweat as he wrestled on live television with a script that had fallen to the floor in mid-speech and had been returned to him with the pages in the wrong order.
If the leader's speech is to be maintained as a stand-alone item, in a more appropriate time-slot, then live coverage of other parts of each conference, particularly on television, should be based on news values alone. As things stand, the parties schedule particular discussions, or feature particular personalities, at certain times because they know in advance when the cameras will be turning.
This turns news and current affairs broadcasting on its head, because it ensures that the really interesting stuff will be carefully moved to a part of the agenda, or even (through the use of workshops) to a physical area of the conference which is out of reach of the cameras.
The decisions about what to broadcast and when, should be made by the broadcasters, not by the politicians.
This, with luck, would substitute authentic political broadcasting for much of the posturing and windbaggery which, under the current formula, gives both broadcasting and politics a bad name.
If and when this problem has been sorted, RTÉ and the politicians alike should then turn their attention to the broadcasting of the Oireachtas.
Here, too, the straitjacket fitted to the national broadcasting station by the politicians has been strangling both institutions.
Again, it is not the case that the Dáil is necessarily dull: when it was broadcast live and at extraordinary length during the collapse of the Reynolds government, the spectacle of politics in free-fall gripped the attention of the nation.
But this, all too regrettably, was an exception. For the most part, our broadcasting of the Dáil and Seanad is redolent, not even of the 19th, but of the 18th century.
If the politicians continue to behave like control freaks, they run the risk of ending up with nothing worth controlling because their potential audience will, quite understandably, be watching something else. And I have a strong feeling that they have not much time left.
John Horgan is professor of journalism at Dublin City University, a member of the Forum on Broadcasting and a former Labour TD