There are excellent reasons why the first stops of sensible revolutionaries en route to seizing a country are that country’s media, and why any successful dictatorship goes to terrible lengths to control them.
Food, choice and safety may vanish, but the airwaves, ever since they opened for business, have been prime real estate for wars of propaganda, information and power. So too bad for Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church that its priests could not hold back the decadent tide of television in the mid-20th century.
Not that Ireland, or the Church, were unique in having their old ways and authorities questioned and altered by word and, more to the point, pictures from the great outside world. Actually, Quebec went far more radically—and successfully—from rigidly closed, thanks to the tangled corruptions of Church and government, to flamboyantly open and secularized in the span of a relatively few turbulent years.
Ireland, however, and not Quebec, is...
Joan Barfoot’s eleventh novel, Exit Lines, was published in 2008 by Knopf Canada. Previous novels have been nominated for the Man Booker and Scotiabank Giller prizes.
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