I.R.A. film will be shown, with ‘amendment’

Press, 9 August 1985, Page 6

I.R.A. film will be shown, with ‘amendment’

NZPA-AFP London The British Broadcasting Corporation will screen "in due course" but with “some amendment" a television film on extremism in Northern Ireland that sparked a journalists’ strike when it was withdrawn.

The film’s withdrawal had led to allegations of Government censorship and a daylong protest strike by journalists, the Corporation’s director-general, Mr Alasdair Milne, said yesterday.

The documentary was banned by the 8.8.C.'s Gov-ernment-appointed Board of Governors, despite opposition by senior management, after the Home Secretary. Mr Leon Brittan, said that it would give “succour to terrorist organisations.” Mr Milne, speaking after a meeting attended by the Governors, broadcasting service chiefs, and the Home Secretary, said that the programme would need “some amendment”. before being broadcast. Mr Brittan had given him an “assurance” that “he would not now, or in the future, censor the 8.8. C.”

But Britain was virtually without broadcast news between 1 p.m. Wednesday and 1 p.m. yesterday (New Zealand time) — when the film was to have been aired — as radio and television journalists backed a 24-hour

strike against the threat of censorship and the undermining of the independence of broadcasting media. The disputed programme. “At the Edge of the Union." consists essentially of interviews with a Catholic, Martin McGuinness, and a Protestant. Gregory Campbell.

Mr McGuinness, who wants a united Ireland, is a senior member of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, and has been called chief of staff of the I.R.A.’s military wing. Mr Campbell is a leader of a hard-line loyalist group that wants Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Lord Annan, who headed a committee, which in 1977 issued a landmark report on the future of broadcasting, described Mr Brittan yesterday as having behaved like a “demented poodle" determined to show loyalty to his mistress (the Prime Minister), Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

Lord Annan, speaking after the National Union of Journalists arranged a showing of the film, said that a “quiet word with the 8.8. C. chairman would have been more sensible” and that the programme had not rated as a “momentous occasion” justifying intervention by the 8.8. C. Governors.