‘People are not capable of making up their minds. They can only decide between two sets of propagandists.’ That was the opinion of Ernest Blythe, a minister in the first government of the Irish Free State and a vocal proponent of censorship. In this final episode, we explore how years of censorship, violence and propaganda transformed the media.
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28:35
Ep 7: Erskine Childers and Enemies of the State
His name was Erskine Childers and he had one goal: to ensure the collapse of the Irish nation into anarchy. Well, that was what the government said. In autumn 1922 both the Dáil and the press were filled with stories of Childers leading the anti-Treaty war on the state. Yet there was one problem with those stories – most of them were false.
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28:40
Ep 6: The Time the IRA Edited the Cork Examiner
For the first six weeks of the Civil War, the anti-Treaty IRA controlled Cork City. During that time they took over the Cork Examiner, a move that was denounced by the paper’s editor, George Crosbie. He accused the IRA of turning the paper into a platform for ‘a vile and insidious propaganda containing a great deal more fiction than fact’.
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27:20
Ep 5: Cumann na mBan's Propaganda Machine
‘It was a day and night job of secret and dangerous activity against terrible difficulties’. That was how Brigid O’Mullane described her role as Cumann na mBan’s Director of Propaganda during the Civil War. O’Mullane was one of many women activists who were integral to republican propaganda projects at home and abroad between 1919 and 1923.
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27:47
Ep 4: You Say Irregular, I Say Republican
We focus on the period between the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the early weeks of the Civil War, exploring how both sides of the Treaty divide sought to gain acceptance and to discredit their opponents. Those efforts included government censorship, competing propaganda projects and the widespread intimidation of journalists.
'Fake News' may be a modern term but propaganda, censorship and fact-spinning have a long history. In Fake News and Irish Freedom, a new series from the team behind RTÉ Radio 1's The History Show, we take stories from the War of Independence and the Civil War to explore the ways in which news can be sourced, influenced and, sometimes, faked.
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