Month: May 2018

A FRESH set of guidelines for what broadcasters can and can’t do during a referendum campaign was needed to provide “greater certainty” over what’s allowed in the run-up to the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment.

Internal records from the Broadcasting Authority said that with four separate votes to come over the next two years, a clearer set of rules was urgently needed with some people up to now having a “weak or incorrect” understanding of what is allowed.

They explain how there was confusion over “artificial balance” governing how much airtime each side should get and how broadcasters could be encouraged to focus on “issues” rather than purely adversarial debates.

The new guidelines also clarified that broadcasters did not need to axe prominent campaign figures if they were appearing in programmes totally unrelated to a referendum.

Late last year, Minister Katherine Zappone was dropped from TV3 cooking show The Restaurant because the station feared complaints if they broadcast the episode in which she featured during a referendum campaign.

The Road Safety Authority (RSA) was forced to abandon plan to tie the public services card to driving licences applications amid concerns from the Attorney General about its legality.

These are the sometimes very frosty to and fro correspondence between the RSA and the Department of Transport about the aborted plan.

THE head of the Department of Justice said a decision to withhold archives from the Kerry Babies case could be “misrepresented” but that the department had to do the “right thing” to protect the woman at the centre of the case.

The Department is keeping the records secret even though they should have gone to the National Archives because thirty years have passed since their creation.

Internal records have shown that the Department of Justice had originally planned handing over transcripts of the Kerry Babies tribunal and other documents so that they could be studied by academics, journalists, and members of the public.

However, the records describe how Joanne Hayes – the wrongly accused mother at the centre of the case – had strongly objected to their release.

Internal emails released under FOI show how the Department of Justice was aware that failure to disclose the documents could be seen as them trying to keep them hidden.

A message sent on January 20 by Acting Secretary General Oonagh McPhillips to colleagues said: “I understand the concern about the perception but in this instance we need to continue to do the right thing even if it’s misrepresented.”

She said it was a “tricky issue” but that there was already a vast amount of material relating to the tribunal in the public domain in books and newspaper archives.

Ms McPhillips was responding to an email from Sarah Kavanagh, a ministerial special adviser, who warned that the state could be criticised if the records were kept hidden.