RTÉ – Ireland’s Fifth Column

When Ireland’s national broadcaster was launched on New Year’s Eve in 1961 President Eamon de Valera compared it to atomic energy – it would either make or break the Irish race.

“Never before was there in the hands of men an instrument so powerful to influence the thoughts and actions of the multitude,” he said.

The new service would either “build up the character” of the nation or demoralise them to “decadence” and “dissolution.”

In keeping with the theme of radioactive energy, Dev said the proliferation of television could potentially lead to an arms race in which networks are vying merely to “give the people what they want,” thus leading them “in the wrong direction, and so standards become lower and lower.”

Consistent with the Long Fella’s zest for able-bodied young Gaels, RTÉ would hopefully ‘induce sturdiness, vigour and confidence’ in the Irish.

The Fianna Fáil leader, not known for his adherence to democratic principles, said the wider public would have autonomy in how the service would progress:

“Now it is you, the people, who will ultimately determine what the programmes in Telefís Éireann are to be.

If you insist on having presented to you the good, and the true, and the beautiful, you will get these.”

He described the good as “wonders of nature” and “masterpieces of architecture,” in contrast to “some squalid domestic brawl or a street quarrel.”

“I, for one, will find it hard to be convinced that good taste cannot be cultivated,” he mentioned.

Dev concluded his address by saying that he harboured “great hopes” for the burgeoning outlet adding that the service would be wise to “bear in mind that we are an old nation, and that we have our own distinctive characteristics, and that it is desirable that these should be preserved.”

“I am sure that [those in charge] will do their part,” he said. “And as I have said, it is for the public now to do theirs. I wish all those in charge Godspeed. And I wish all of you a very happy new year.”

Fast forward to 2024 and a quote from the same broadcaster set up to promote and strengthen Irish culture reads: ‘Does the religious nature of common Irish phrases pose a problem? Will phrases like “Dia Duit” soon be replaced by alternatives better suited to our multicultural, secular society?’ The article in question examined whether the native Irish tongue should be amended to acculturate with postmodern precepts in an increasingly secular and heterogeneous society.

The Irish language, which despite centuries of suppression from the Anglo yoke and disregard from a culturally hostile Anglocentric ruling class, has managed to conserve its religious elements but may not survive the current global homogenous revolution with RTÉ acting as the conduit.

That vain hope expressed by Dev came at a time of immense cultural and political change when the 1960s ‘boomer’ generation began in earnest their long march through the institutions.

Montrose was not left unscathed.

The driving force for the revolutionary fervour that subsumed the Donnybrook station was the Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the Irish Republican Army, the Official IRA, known colloquially as the Stickies on account of their preference for glueing Easter Lillies on their uniforms.

Heading this crew of Bolshie subversives was the ‘thin blue flame’ in the form of self-described “Stalinist” Eoghan Harris.

Despite his current frailty and propensity to anonymously troll female journalists with lewd sexual innuendo involving Mary Lou McDonald’s buttocks, Harris engineered an infiltration of the monopolised receptor of news and current affairs in a fashion that would make Saul Alinsky blush.

The political wing of the Officials, the Sinn Féin Workers Party (SFWP) established the highly secretive Ned Stapleton Cumann, named after the communist activist who died in 1973. The Cumann acted as the channel by which the supposed repository of Irish culture instead adopted a neo-Marxist line. This at a time when the Provisional wing of the IRA split from the Officials whose explicit Marxism (in lieu of Nationalism) and non-violence left minority Catholics at the mercy of violent pogroms in Derry and Belfast: I-R-A would be mocked as I Ran Away from boastful Loyalists.

It was via this secretive Cumann that Harris recruited fellow like-minded revolutionaries to the upper echelons of RTÉ including the recently deceased journalist Charlie Bird, at the time an active member of the Workers Party, Patrick Kinsella, a former Dublin Comhairle Ceantair member and radical feminist Marian Finucane.

Despite their penchant for secrecy, this band of revolutionaries were anything but inconspicuous in the editorial lines they adopted. Then-leader of the Labour Party Michael O’Leary commented that RTÉ’s coverage was increasingly “Stickie-Oriented.” Things got so bad that the director general was forced to intervene and uphold the broadcaster’s remit to remain objective and impartial by quelling political involvement of employees. However, this did nothing to halt the long march.

From Today Tonight – the precursor to Prime Time – to the Late Late Show RTÉ became a glorified outfit for the SFWP line with Stickie members regularly interviewed without disclosing their political affiliation and selected as in-studio audience members. The Communist Party of Ireland member turned DCU Communications emeritus professor Helena Sheehan described RTÉ’s staff in the 60s as “people of progressive and even radical views” and that “although their work never expressed the full force of their convictions they nevertheless put up a formidable fight to secularise and liberalise programme output” (my emphasis). When the broadcaster dared to sponsor a programme that sought to uncover the shady underworld of paramilitarism from the INLA to the Officials, journalists working on the investigative series reported experiencing unrelenting intimidation including bomb threats from the Sticks.

Denounced as everything from ‘Masonic’ to Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s colourful description of them as “Vipers”, the Sticks’ methods of careful selection of employees and dictation of programme content proved the Max Horkheimer quotation that, “The Revolution won’t happen with guns… rather it will happen incrementally… we will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”

Apart from the explicitly revolutionary red factions that successfully steered RTÉ in a notably Marxist trajectory, the other side of the left-wing coin saw the “hush puppies” – Harris’ description – adopt a stubbornly secularist and church-bashing agenda. This shift was embodied in Betty Purcell whose stated aim at the broadcaster was to take on the “powerhouses of State, church and big business” of an Ireland she described as “rancid” and “dull.”

Aside from quarrelling for political dominance with the SFWP malcontents, the minute she arrived at Montrose she felt at home: “By the time I was appointed a radio producer in 1979, there were many such figures in the station, most of them commendable … Broadcasting for me, was a continuation of politics by other means, and was a route to effecting social change and exposing injustice.”

Having worked on the ‘Women’s Today’ programme which adopted a stringently feminist editorial line through the employment of hosts such as Finucane who claimed to have been a thorn on the side of the “moral authority” of the church, she eventually rose up the ranks and edited the popular ‘Questions and Answers’ programme.

Lambasting “the insistence on balancing competing viewpoints” she worried such an approach would encourage “the identification of conservatism with truth.”

Although she did have on as guests Catholic conservative commentators such as John Waters and David Quinn, the latter of whom was described as the mainstream media’s “whipping boy” by the late Desmond Fennell, they were mere props to present a veneer of objectivity with the overall production slanted heavily to the left.

Despite Ireland being a Catholic supermajority country with over 90 per cent of adults attending weekly mass, RTÉ’s editorial line did not reflect this, bearing all the hallmarks of a creepy and invasive psychological operation.

When the nation grappled with various social issues into the 70s the national broadcaster’s bias and contempt for the majority was in full view leading TD Oliver J. Flanagan to comment that “sex never came to Ireland until Telefís Éireann went on the air.” RTÉ’s Director General outlined the challenge facing the broadcaster in this period by quoting Antonio Gramsci saying, “The old world is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there are many morbid symptoms.”

In the 1970s the radical feminist National Women’s Liberation Movement (NWLM) rose to prominence with their infamous ‘Contraception Train’ to the liberalising and enlightened section of Ireland that happened to be part of the United Kingdom in Belfast to acquire birth control that was banned in the pious Republic. 

The broadcaster hired multiple members of the NWLM leading then Director of Personnel to comment that RTÉ’s coverage of the event showed they were “over­ concerned with the contraceptive issue.” 

But it was the Late Late Show which, according to the historian Diarmuid Ferriter, became “the surprise facilitator of questioning of accepted political and social orthodoxies.” 

At the rearguard of this liberalising mass production was the Christian Brothers’ educated host Gay Byrne. 

There was no limit to what Gaybo would cover. From how to put on a condom to gay sex a quote from an Editorial Meeting mentioned that the show was “quite explicit on the activities of homosexuals…wrongly giving youngsters the impression that this was ‘normal’ behaviour.” 

Another host John Bowman, who presented Today Tonight and Questions and Answers, could not hide his contempt for old Ireland and lust for the new. 

When the Republic legalised divorce by the slimmest of margins in 1995 he commented, “The new history is that Ireland has voted for divorce. It’s perhaps a case of hello divorce, goodbye De Valera.” 

When the 1980s arrived amid a wave of Pabloist sexual politics that had subsumed the West Ireland stood out like a sore thumb and went in the opposite direction by taking steps to enshrine the equal right to life for both mother and child in the constitution. 

When the Irish Supreme Court, following the example of the US, declared that the right to privacy was implied in the constitution pro-life advocates worried about a slippery slope towards abortion on demand which the US had enshrined in 1974 under Roe v Wade using the unenumerated right to privacy as the rationale. 

During that period RTÉ did their very best to champion the pro-choice cause. 

Gay Byrne interviewed a woman Anna Raeburn who described rather nonchalantly her experience having had an abortion while Marian Finucane hosted a programme titled Abortion where she highlighted the ‘plight’ of women having to travel to Britain to murder their children. 

In the end, the Irish public voted overwhelmingly for the Eighth Amendment with the national broadcaster appearing more and more out of touch by the day. 

When the issue of abortion reared its head yet again in 2018 RTÉ helped to achieve what it failed to do in the 80s. 

RTÉ point black refused to air interviews it had conducted with nurses and midwives who expressed support for the Eighth Amendment; prevented the pro-life side from selecting their preferred candidates for television debates; and prominent pro-choice campaigner Dr Peter Boylan was promised by RTÉ head of news Jon Williams and presenter Claire Byrne that he would be given a right of immediate response to anything that arose during debates on abortion. 

Just as when the broadcaster won the election for the current Marxist occupant of Áras an Uachtaráin Michael D Higgins by sharing an erroneous tweet claiming his 2011 election opponent Seán Gallagher had taken a €5,000 gift, RTÉ helped swing the election in favour of repeal. 

Not content with mere electoral victory RTÉ continued to rub the pro-life’s noses in it by frequently featuring celebratory documentaries about abortion with an obvious bias. 

One such series was the Open Society Foundation-backed ‘The 8th’ series which deployed phrases such as ‘reproductive rights’ in a manner that takes pro-choice partisan jargon at face value. 

In a more recent ‘RTÉ Investigates’ series the broadcaster interviewed the openly pro-abortion Barrister Marie O’Shea who called for the removal of the three-day waiting period and sought to highlight isolated cases of women still having to travel to obtain a termination of their offspring and all but ignoring cases involving the murder of unborn children misdiagnosed of having a fatal foetal abnormality. 

But it’s in the national broadcaster’s coverage of the Catholic Church that the mask slips off entirely. 

In May 2011 Prime Time hosted a series called “Mission to Prey” in which journalist Aoife Kavanagh ‘uncovered’ the case of Catholic Priest Kevin Reynolds who allegedly raped and impregnated a Kenyan teenager while a missionary in the East African State. 

Despite his pleas to conduct a DNA test to prove his innocence RTÉ refused instead publishing the allegations as fact. 

As a result of the broadcast, Father Reynolds was removed from both his home and parish. Then Minister for Justice Alan Shatter promised to clamp down hard on the Catholic priest saying, “There can be no hiding place for those who do these despicable acts to children.” 

When subsequent DNA tests proved his innocence the broadcaster’s anti-Catholic bias was in full view. 

While Aoife Kavanagh did lose her job as an RTÉ reporter she remained a presenter on Morning Ireland and produced several other documentaries including one on the disgraced FAI CEO John Delaney for RTÉ. In ‘progressive’ Ireland there’s no amount of blood libel you can commit against Catholics that won’t get you cancelled. 

Other documentaries sought to portray Ireland’s Catholic past as a dark age rife with abuse and scandal.

Documentaries such as ‘Ireland’s Dirty Laundry’ and more recently ‘Stolen’ highlighted the conditions women faced in the historic Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. 

Seeming to ignore governmental findings that concluded “the state and the local authority did not coerce women to enter homes, and neither did the Catholic Church” and that “the quality of maternity care in mother and baby homes were probably superior to that available to the majority of Irish women at the time”, RTÉ portrayed these religious institutions as dungeons with women as prisoners of the past’s pieties. 

The blatant disinformation led historian Dr Eugene Jordan to comment, “What we can say for sure is that the dirtiest laundry in 21st century Ireland is located in the Dublin suburb of Donnybrook and has gained a reputation for broadcasting Revisionist Toxic Effrontery.” 

In a recent RTÉ Radio One broadcast alleged comedian Oliver Callan reported on Roscommon having their first ‘pride’ parade mentioning in a rather derisory fashion that the county had ‘famously’ or ‘infamously’ said ‘No’ to equal marriage’. 

This led Independent Senator Rónán Mullen to publicly state he would no longer pay his TV License Fee of €160 per year. 

Right now thousands of Irish people pay a fee to have their culture, customs and traditions trashed daily. 

Friends don’t let friends pay the TV license fee.