Recollections of David Thornley

Muiris Mac Conghail and D. R. Lysaght remember David Thornley

The TV persona

DURING THE SUMMER months of 1966, Gunnar Rugheimer, then Controlller of Programmes, television, at RTE, was laying the groundwork for what was to be his final and most important conntribution to the development of broaddcasting: a new look current affairs scheed ule was to include a political affairs programme which would rely, in the first instance on RTE's own journalists and commentators rather than on the utilisation of the political corresponndents of the national daily newspapers. It was also intended to encourage Miniisters, and members of both houses of the Oireachtas to participate in proogramming on a more regular basis and in a more open manner whereby they could be questioned directly on matters of policy and controversy.

It is difficult now to picture what a change in broadcasting policy that was to be and what trauma was in store for politician and broadcaster alike in the years that were to follow. RTE had a small television current affairs team and relied to a considerable degree on the availability of part-time commentators. It was now intended to assemble two full time teams of broadcasters to serrvice the then once a week Seven Days and a programme called Division (these titles came much later.) There was a young group of newly trained prooducers, but who was to present and front the programmes and where was the reporter effort to come from.

I was instructed by Rugheimer to terminate the Hurler on the Ditch, come if possible to a friendly arrangement with the political correspondents and to recruit David Thornley on contract. Getting Thornley in was somewhat difficult, he naturally was concerned about the degree of commitment he would have to give and the effect of that on his own teaching, particularly in relation to 'his 1913-1939 course at Trinity, Surrprisingly too, perhaps, David was very worried about his capacity to broadcast; a distinguished academic, who secured the highest first in History and Political Science since F .S.L. Lyons' (now Proovost) and a very careful writer, he wonndered whether as a novice broadcaster, all that he had achieved so far by hard work would be for nought if he should fail.

It took some considerable pressure and very great reassurance on my part to persuade him finally to join us in our new programming venture. I think that David Thornley always worried about the prospect of failure. Those of us less gifted than he, rarely understood the, degree of commitment which he gave to every task which he undertook. There is no doubt that he took to broadcasting like a duck to water, but as I have said, his commitment to it made him a model in terms of his preparation for every broadcast. I have retained some notes which he made as part of his preramme work and they show the mind of a very perceptive journalist eager to ennquire, to pursue and ultimately to deliver to his audience.

It would be impossible now for anyybody to imagine a current affairs output without regular political items in it, inncluding face-to-face interviews with senior politicians. Rugheimer's strategy of 12 years ago was designed to secure such an access. Politicians were rather tentative towards, if not downright suspicious of television. It was someething, they felt, outside their immediate controL Its rules were unknown, there was too much of a show-biz atmosphere about it, the crowd out at Montrose were foreigners and unknown to them. In all these views, they were encouraged by the- newspapers and particularly by their parliamentary staffs.

Our job was to effect an entry into Leinster House, become reasonably familiar to and with members and by a careful programme strategy which was to be largely educative and informationnal, to begin the process of seriously analysing political events within the State.

Suddenly there appeared in a poliitical affairs programme called Division a broadcaster of style, wit and authority who seemed to have spent his previous existence in preparing for this new role. A Trinity College magazine of the perriod described Thornley thus " ... .TV perrsonality, left-wing Catholic, historian of modern Irish history, socialist of some form or other, boxer, pop fan, and a debunker of Persian mythology. The swaggering, pink-shirted figure of Dr. David Thornley is as common a sight on the corridors of Montrose as it is on the cobbles of Front Square. He is one of the few Trinity Academics - if his actiivist conscience does not take that label as an insult - the mention of whose name in the remoter corners of Tipperrary or Cork is liable to provoke more than an uninterested grunt".

Well there were certainly grunts at a very early stage in the Division proggramme. While we did stick to the outtline brief and attempted to explain' parliamentary procedures, present proofiles of departments and in general, follow the work of the Dail with parrticular emphasis on institutional matters, current controversies could not be iggnored.

Very soon we found ourselves invollved because of our editorial policy in a major controversy surrounding a row between the Irish Farmers Association and the then Minister for Agriculture, Mr. Charles Haughey. RTE became the subject of a very important policy statement by Sean Lemass which is too well known to require a recital of it here. Suffice it to say, that Division was blacked by Fianna Fail for a period. The reasons for this blacking are explicable as much by the fact that television was still a stranger to Leinster House as disstinct from the openly expressed desire of politicians of all parties to require current affairs output to obey and be directed, to be 'reasonable' and to respond to the national interest.

It was David Thornley's status as a broadcaster, although a recent recruit to the Service, which brought us· through that first major trauma. It was he above all others, I believe, who perrsuaded politicians that RTE was seriouusly involved in the business of trying to involve the audience in the substance of political affairs.

The matter of our blacking in Division was resolved by Sean Lemass's successor Jack Lynch agreeing to give his first long interview a week after he took up office in November 1966, and to the work of his Parliamentary Seccretary, the late Michael Carty.

The regard in which David Thornley was held by all political parties created a new relationship with Leinster House and enabled current affairs programmming to chart a new course for political journalism within a relatively short span of years. David Thornley was able to reeport on the first year of the new approach thus: "One's final note must nevertheless be optimistic. The price we have paid for the intimate quality of Irish politics is a' tribal, introverted, selffcongratulatory perpetuation. Television is the greatest way of drawing the voters into politics since Pericles could gather them all in earshot (or rather, as many of them as possessed the necessary prooperty qualification). In Ireland, poliitical television in the sense of meaninggful, national public controversy between our rulers is little more than a year old. In that time we have, I respectfully suggest, proceeded' at a pace far outtstripping .the long apprenticeship of the BBC under Lord Reith and his successsors, and the future is full of hope." (Administration, Vo1.l5,No.3 Autumn, 1967).

Thereafter David Thornley became one of the key broadcasters in the new twice weekly 7 Days programme and saw much of that hope fulfilled. His departure to Leinster House was inevittable as indeed was the decline in the current affairs output; the period bettween Vatican 11 and Humanae Vitae had taken its toll, change was no lonnger on the agenda.

With the very great changes on the demographic characteristics of the country broadcasting must take its courage in its hand again and move not with sorrow from David Thornely's final resting place but with a renewed commmitment to serve .•

Muiris Mac Conghail is now Director of Programmes of RTE TV and was head of both Divison and Seven Days when David Thornley worked on these proggrammes.

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Memoire of a fellow MarXist

Tags: Fianna Fail

DAVID THORNLEY'S DEATH is as great a loss as Seamus Costello's murder. In the previous decade Seamus had changed little; David had moved from non-commitment to revolutionary poliitics.

Of course this has generally been iggnored. The obituaries commemmorate David as Don and television pundit. His terminal sickness is ascribed to disilluusion with the dirty world of politics. His eventual radicalism is considered to have been an abheration caused by this illlness.

In fact, in his last Irish Times article, David portrayed himself accurately as Hamlet. Like Hamlet he had two connflicting personae: the radical intellecctual and the academic establishmentarrian. To his credit, he ended by supportting the first against the second. In doing so, he destroyed himself.

The present author's first meeting with David Thornley was in TCD in 1959 when he was a Junior Freshman and David a newly fledged Ph.D. Allready he had lived eight years of poliitical intervention. He had worked in Noel Browne's successful independent campaign in 1951, in his unsuccessful Fianna Fail campaign in 1954 and had organised his return to the Dail (again as an Independent) in 1957. Between the last two campaigns he had taken a brilliiant First and, since the latter, he had broken with Noel in 1958 and, of course, taken his Doctorate.

It would have been pleasant had this begun an academic and political partnerrship. It didn't. David and the author collaborated in resurrecting what was then the Fabian Society (now the Trinnity Young Socialists). Personally and politically we soon disagreed. David was not, then, a Marxist, but a right-wing Social Democrat who liked to proclaim himself a "Liberal Christian Socialist." (He was not dissimulating; even in the early sixties, TCD was not duly risky for sufficiently brilliant Marxists; in its Science Department, Justin Keating was openly adhering to what he thought was Dialectical Materialism.) To students who were if not yet Marxists then going thither morr determinedly than David, his attitude was unpopular. His admiraation for Herbert Morrison and his desscription of Harold Wilson as a "great Christian Socialist" were unacceptable. On some matters nearer home he was also unsatisfactory. As yet the national question was not an issue, but on Proportional Representation, which he had defended in 1959 and which he would defend decisively in 1968, he tennded to waver. More academically, it seemed strange for a Socialist to choose to write respectfully about Isaac Butt.

In one sense, these instincts were correct. David Thornley was trying to justify an escape from his youthful poliitics. To underestimate Ireland's probblems was necessary to justify retreating into academic life and emerging, if at all, as a University Senator or as the "hurler on the ditch" he sought to be in Seven Days.

There were reasons for this. He was near the top of the academic greasy pole. He enjoyed being a Don, a Knight of the Camparile, in dressing in top hat and morning coat for Trinity Week. He was instinctively and emotionally a member of the academic establishment.

This had a price. His politics lectures were not good; they tended to be evaasive on modern theory. It may have been because of inexperience: Political Science is a big subject. Nonetheless, his extra curricula speeches were often similar: glib superficiality covered by undue dependence on personalia. His writings tended to be bland, too. In both cases, exceptions made the rule more irritating.

Then David was appointed to Seven Days. Ten years later, his intelligence could have been contained by an authoority more experienced in the subtler forms of censorship. Instead he was enncouraged to think; to face the problems that he had sought to cure by placebo. He rediscovered his politics. He opposed Fianna Fail on PR. By 1969, he could neither remain 'on the ditch' nor join any party other than the apparently revitalised Labour Party. Two years later, he was self-proc1aimedly a Marxxist.

Yet he did not identify with Labour's left or the then far left. The tendencies of his academic years died hard. He beecame, in practice, theoretician for the Party's rural coalitionist wing. As such, rather than because of the Fascist scare peddled by Cruise O'Brien, he supporrted Coalition at Cork in 1970. At Gallway, the next year, he defended Stephen Coughlan against expulsion for his anti-semitic outlook (a good turn Coughlan never repaid).

That was his last political comproomise. At Galway he voted with the far left against tying the party's hands in inndustrial disputes. For the rest of his parliamentary career, he opposed his former coalition politics attacking to the utmost degree consistent with Labour Party membership, the represssive measures that that party had helped initiate in Coalition. His defence of the Sinn Fein (Kevin Street)'s right to commmemorate 1916 even lost him the Party Whip.

The personal pressures that had obbstructed him took revenge for his deesertion. Those he opposed were his sort of people: often personal friends. He wanted to believe with them in peaceful progress through gradual inevitability. Instead, in the law and order hysteria that was fostered by the Coalition, he couldn't even agree to differ with them. Meanwhile many on the left were reeluctant to accept him. These pressures brought on the illness that killed him.

Had he lived he would have prod,ucced better work than ever before. He had rejoined his old comrade, Noel Browne, in the Socialist Labour Party. His work on Pearse would have saved that figure (in some ways very like himself) from both the adulation and the abuse that had covered him. It was not to be. All we have to remember him is the memmory of a courteous and kindly individual who used his great talents to reach the top but who could not live to apply them where they were really needed .•

D. R. 0 'Connor Lysaght is author of "The Republic of Ireland" and member of The Movement for a Socialist Reepublic.