When a crackdown involving the IRA backfires, comically, in Prohibition.
In Dublin in 1981, at the Sinn Fein Ard Fahs conference – the annual conference of what was widely seen as the political wing of the IRA – Danny Morrison, who had become Sinn Fein’s propaganda director two years earlier, posed a challenge: “Who here really thinks we can win the war at the ballot box? But will anyone here object if we take power in Ireland, with a ballot paper in this hand and an armalite ticket in the other?”
It is easy to imagine how Margaret Thatcher, who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, felt watching this event. Her dissatisfaction could only grow in October 1984, when the IRA planted a bomb in a Brighton hotel that narrowly missed it. The IRA’s statement in the aftermath – “Remember we’ve only got to be lucky once, you’ve got to be lucky always” – made it clear that it was dealing with a powerful enemy, as adept at eloquent and memorable pronouncements as at using explosives. In a speech the following year, Thatcher said: “We must try to find ways of starving terrorists and hijackers of the oxygen of propaganda on which they depend.” The British media called for self-regulation in order to prevent a situation where a Sinn Féin spokesman could appear on television after an IRA outburst and calmly claim that it was all in the name of Irish freedom. What happened next is the subject of Roisín Agnew’s sharply edited and insightful documentary “Prohibition.”
Morrison was one of the generation of activists who led Sinn Fein in the early 1980s, as was Gerry Adams, who became party president in 1983. Martin McGuinness, Adams’s MP in Derry, was a formidable bunch – an articulate and flamboyant media figure. If you want a quick overview, Morrison can always provide you with one. If you want a more thoughtful set of Jesuit arguments for the Republican cause, you’ll look no further than Adams. Of the three, McGuinness was the most solid and direct. Part of the threat these men posed was their ability to talk like reasonable politicians while running a ruthless campaign of terror.
Once the first television station was established in Dublin, in 1961, the Irish government gave itself the right to censor material intended for broadcast. In 1971, it went further, effectively banning groups such as Sinn Féin and the IRA from the airwaves. This ban remained in place until 1994, the same year the IRA declared a ceasefire.
The British did not have legislation like this to silence everyone. But in October 1988, the Thatcher administration decided that its initial call for media self-regulation was insufficient. The result was one of the most farcical, counterproductive and clumsy events in the long history of British efforts to deal with Ireland.
The British government announced that the voices of representatives of Sinn Féin or the IRA, among others, would not be broadcast on television or radio. Broadcasters soon discovered a loophole in this ban: they began hiring actors to produce voice-overs for interviews with Sinn Féin leaders and others affected by the restrictions. And in the six years that the ban lasted (like the Irish ban, it ended in 1994), while watching interviews on British news channels, I tried to guess which actor was doing the dubbing. I was in Dublin at the time, and at that time the booming presence of Mrs Thatcher was looming large. I wondered why she thought these voice-overs were serving the nation, other than providing joy to the nation. For example, have you listened to Stephen Rea play Adams? Out of all the actors, Rhea stood apart. Because he was married to a former IRA striker, there were objections to his on-air presence. But the real problem was that he could embody any role he played with brilliant and extraordinary skill. On stage he played Lord Haw-Haw (who was broadcasting for Hitler); He played Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s propaganda minister; He played Clov in Samuel Beckett’s play “End game“; he played Oscar Wilde. Now he is one of the actors who voiced Adams. At times, he seemed better than Adams—less self-satisfied and hypocritical. As Adams himself points out in “Ban,” Rea’s performance “was a great improvement on my monotony.”