Should have been introduced in 1973 but Justin Keating, the then Minister for Industry and Commerce, turned down my request, made on behalf of the National Union of Journalists, to introduce such legislation. Tony OReilly is a rich and powerful man, he told me at a meeting in his office. I was Group Industrial Correspondent in Independent Newspapers at the time and a voluntary official of the National Union of Journalists who had just led a successful week-long sit-in seeking guarantees for journalists and journalism from OReilly. I regarded this as a big failure. I thought that Keating, an alleged leading socialist and republican and a very successful agricultural journalist in RTE, would have had little difficulty in taking on board what was being said. Basically, the case was that to allow OReilly such control of so much of the media, daily and provincial, was to allow an over-mighty player that even governments would be afraid to challenge. OReilly was a puny player vis-a-vis Denis OBrian.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 10:32:07 +0000
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