We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

Another way of understanding these subtleties would be to recall the deft way in which a landmark moment in Irish broadcasting was allowed to happen. On Wednesday 4 April 1979, six months before John Paul’s visit, RTÉ broadcast a sober, sensitive but in its own way revolutionary radio documentary made by Marian Finucane. It was called simply Abortion. It was a straight, non-judgemental account of a young woman’s journey to England to have an abortion. But the very subject created alarm. The station’s editorial committee instructed the head of features, Michael Littleton, to determine ‘the suitability of this item before it is transmitted’. Littleton, a fine and supportive editor, asked Finucane for the tapes and told her: ‘I want to listen to that to see if it is suitable for transmission.’ As Finucane later recalled, ‘He came back, and he came over to me and said, “That’s OK: the sound quality is excellent”. He never said another word to me about it. And it went out.’ She was somewhat taken aback by the brevity of his response and the absence of any real reaction to the content of a groundbreaking documentary. ‘In retrospect’, she later reflected, ‘I think he was making another point altogether.’8 This is the way things worked. Littleton did not defy the instruction from the editorial committee. He pretended to think that the order to check its suitability for transmission related to technical sound quality. He did not commit himself to any praise for Finucane’s work – he...