 It
began as a new counter-terrorism strategy aimed at silencing the
apologists for terror and denying them the oxygen of publicity. That, at
least, is how the prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, and her
home secretary, Douglas Hurd, defended their decision, in October 1988,
to introduce some of the most stringent controls imposed on the
broadcast media since World War Two.
The broadcasting ban, or 'Restrictions' as they were officially known,
extended to 11 republican and loyalist organisations believed to support
terrorism, but many believed that Sinn Féin and the IRA were the main
targets.
Newspapers would be permitted to carry statements from those
organisations, and television news programmes would be permitted to show
images of spokesmen at press conferences, but their voices would have to
be removed.
With 20 years' worth of hindsight, Douglas Hurd now says he accepts that
the ban soon became enormously counter-productive. Not least because
broadcasters quickly found a way to subvert the terms of the new law by
having actors re-voice the words spoken by Sinn Féin spokesmen.
When a similar ban had been introduced by the Republic of Ireland in
1971, the Irish government saw to it that their prohibition could not be
circumvented by this kind of dubbing.
Unaccountably, when the British government introduced its restrictions,
in the wake of a major atrocity, it left a legislative back door open
which journalists soon used as a route to get their story out.
Satirists lampooned the ban, free speech campaigners across the world
questioned the Thatcher government's commitment to democratic values,
and even the reputation of the BBC, as a politically independent
broadcaster, suffered.
Despite the legislations' loopholes and the reaction against it, Danny
Morrison, Sinn Féin's former director of publicity, maintains that the
ban, which remained in place for six years, seriously frustrated Sinn
Féin's media strategy at the time and ultimately harmed the party
electorally.
The story has recently been retold in the BBC Radio Ulster programme,
The War Of The Words, presented by William Crawley and produced by
Owen McFadden.
|
