With the final episode to be screened tomorrow night it's clear that RTE's Haughey documentary is interesting and engaging as well as seriously flawed. Whether it is 'biased' as many claim is somewhat beside the point. After the first episode Ronan Fanning humorously exposed some of the infelicities in the first episode covering the early years. Colum Kenny of DCU's School of Communications has an interesting piece in the Sunday Independent this morning and he also points out several shortcomings in the way the material has been presented. He goes on to talk about the question of 'balance' and makes the following sensible point:
Balance does not require a suspension of judgement. At this stage, enough about Haughey is known for broadcasters and journalists to take a more adversarial role towards him. You do not have to "beat people over the head" to interrogate them robustly. Yet Mint's four-part series has been a popular success. The archives are great to look at, disclosing people's personalities in a way words could not.
I hope there is some attempt to pull together the various strands of Haughey's career and come to some sort of conclusion, or at least to acknowledge the possibility of different conclusions. I hope the acerbic wit of Tom Garvin features in there somewhere. But I suspect that the conclusion will be that Haughey was/is sui generis and thus a one-off. This would leave out of the account how Fianna Fáil, as a highly successful, populist political party, gives rise to a certain kind of political culture where the likes of Haughey and his later followers can flourish.
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