When a Crackdown Involving the I.R.A. Backfired, Comically, in “The Ban”

In Dublin in 1981, at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis—an annual convention for what was widely regarded as the Irish Republican Army’s political wing—Danny Morrison, who had become Sinn Féin’s director of publicity two years earlier, set out a challenge: “Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?”

It is easy to imagine how Margaret Thatcher, who became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, must have felt watching this. Her displeasure could only have increased in October, 1984, when the I.R.A. planted a bomb in a Brighton hotel that narrowly missed her. The I.R.A.’s statement in the aftermath—“Remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always”—made clear that she was dealing with a powerful enemy, as skilled at pithy and memorable statements as in the use of explosives. In a speech the following year, Thatcher said, “We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.” She called on the British media to self-regulate in order to prevent the kind of situation in which a spokesman for Sinn Féin could appear on television after an I.R.A. outrage and calmly claim that it was all in the name of Irish freedom. What happened next is the subject of Roisin Agnew’s incisive and sharply edited documentary film “The Ban.”

Morrison was one of a generation of activists who took over the Sinn Féin leadership in the early nineteen-eighties, as was Gerry Adams, who became president of the Party in 1983. Along with Martin McGuinness, Adams’s deputy in Derry, they were a formidable group—articulate and brilliant media performers. If you wanted a quick sound bite, Morrison could always provide one. If you wanted a more thoughtful and Jesuitical set of arguments for the Republican cause, then you would seek out Adams. Of the three, McGuinness was the most steely and direct. Part of the threat that these men posed was their ability to speak like reasonable politicians while effectively running a ruthless terrorist campaign.

As soon as the first television station was set up in Dublin, in 1961, the Irish government gave itself the right to censor material meant for broadcast. In 1971, it went further, effectively barring groups like Sinn Féin and the I.R.A. from the airwaves. This ban remained in place until 1994, the same year the I.R.A. declared a ceasefire.

The British did not have legislation as all-silencing as this. But, in October, 1988, Thatcher’s administration decided that her initial call for media self-regulation was not enough. What resulted is one of the most comic, counterproductive, and clumsy episodes in the long history of British efforts to deal with Ireland.

The British government declared that the voices of Sinn Féin or I.R.A. representatives, among others, were not to be broadcast on television or radio. Broadcasters soon discovered a loophole in this ban: they began hiring actors to produce voice-overs for interviews with Sinn Féin leaders and others affected by the restriction. In the six years that the ban lasted (like the Irish ban, it ended in 1994), while watching interviews on the British news channels, you tried to guess which actor was doing the dubbing. I was in Dublin then, and it was a time when the booming presence of Mrs. Thatcher loomed large. I wondered what cause she believed these voice-overs served, other than providing glee for the nation. For example, did she listen to Stephen Rea playing Adams? Of all the actors, Rea stood apart. Because he was married to a former I.R.A. bomber, there were objections to his presence on air. But the real problem was that he could embody any role that he took on with consummate and uncanny skill. Onstage he had played Lord Haw-Haw (who broadcast for Hitler); he had played Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s propaganda minister; he had played Clov, in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”; he had played Oscar Wilde. Now he was one of the actors who voiced Adams. Sometimes, he even sounded better than Adams—less self-satisfied and sanctimonious. As Adams himself points out in “The Ban,” Rea’s performance “was a great improvement on my monotone.”