Church 'concerned' with RTE

THE Church of Ireland has expressed reservations about RTE relegating religion to a sub-category of 'diversity' in its broadcasting policy, but has said that in general it is happy with how the station covers religious topics.

The comments from the head of the Church of Ireland's broadcasting committee, Reverend Alan McCormack, come after a strong attack on RTE by the Catholic Church for not giving sufficient prominence to religion in its programming.

Rev McCormack said: "On publication of the RTE Statement of Commitments 2004, it would be fair to say that most of the Christian churches had certain reservations over the omission of the category of 'religion' and the privileging of the category of 'diversity'."

However, he said, the Church of Ireland doesn't believe that 'diversity' as a category is necessarily harmful to religious broadcasting so long as it genuinely seeks to include religious programming, and RTE does not use it "as a way of escaping from their obligation to make religious programmes".

He remarked that in general RTE has a "positive track record in supplying the needs of religiously inclined Irish citizens".

Rev McCormack also said he was not alarmed by the decision of RTE to allocate just five of the 135 hours of TV programming it will broadcast over the Christmas period to religion.

He said the five-hour figure did not include radio and "RTE is continuing to devote over Christmas an impressive number of hours of radio to conventional religious programming".

In the annual report of the Catholic Communications Office, Bishop Joe Duffy sharply criticised RTE for not giving religion a category of its own in its new broadcasting policy.

David Quinn
Religious Affairs Correspondent

? Irish Independent
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ & http://www.unison.ie/