Under the heading `RTE sells its soul to a bomber' Muiris MacConghail wrote in Thursday's Irish Times that "RTE did not, of course, break the original Magee story, but once published, RTE sees no difficulty in abandoning all its editorial responsibilities and swimming with the sharks."

The programme in question was last week's RTE radio interview with Brighton bomber Patrick Magee, whose first ever interview was carried by this newspaper the previous week. MacConghail said he could see no reason why RTE should provide a platform for people who murdered his neighbours, and then went on to make a pointed attack on RTE's director general.

MacConghail's article was an angry response to RTE's decision to interview Magee, but more importantly it raised questions about the role of our broadcasting service now that peace has broken out.

If for all essential purposes the 30-year war in the North is now over, is a national broadcaster to seek the witness of all the participants to these events? To put it another way, is there an opportunity now to redress the pitiful vacuum of the Section 31 years?

The article was doubly important because its author ran RTE television for more of those troubled years than anyone else. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to claim that such was MacConghail's power in those single channel days that few could work in television in Ireland without his approval.

But now, even allowing for MacConghail's understandable desire to protect his professional reputation after his Section 31 days, it is difficult to understand his concern that someone like Magee was interviewed.

Not least, historical questions are raised. The Brighton bombing was 16 years ago -- would, for example, an interview by Radio Eireann of, say, Tom Barry some 20 years after Kilmicheal, be equally unacceptable? That much of Irish history is made up of murder and mayhem is undeniable, so how is it to be recorded if certain participants are to be excluded because we don't like either their politics or their actions?

Even more importantly, in the subtext of the process of reconciliation and redemption that underlies the peace process, there is immense need for all those who were involved in violence to talk. After years in prison both they and us on the outside need to reconsider not least the moral question of violence itself.

The relatives of the victims, too, still need answers, and the moral indignation that many still feel for those who perpetrated that violence also needs addressing. For example, we do not have a truth commission, which has been such a powerful force for reconciliation in South Africa, and in lieu of this the media in Ireland now have a unique opportunity to address these matters in a similar fashion. Can you imagine a more useful role for broadcasting than helping to heal the national wounds?

I am of the opinion that the Section 31 censorship imposed on republicans during the 30-year war was actually one of the significant factors in prolonging the duration of that war. Far from mariginalising or minimising republicans, it served to increase their political and intellectual ghettoisation and cut them adrift from any national consensus or any sense of being responsible to anyone other than their own for their activities. Worse, as they became militarily undefeatable it simply prolonged the long and bloody years until they eventually came into democratic politics.

Had Section 31 been lifted after the hunger strike election of Bobby Sands some 20 years ago, and had the media encouraged the then emerging process of republican politicisation, would it have taken another 17 years for a ceasefire to be declared? Critically, the lifting then of Section 31 would have forced the emerging political forces in republicanism to engage with the reality that without any democratic mandate they could and would not be taken seriously. In these circumstances, who cannot reasonably argue that censorship did not serve to prolong the war?

To talk to republicans now about what they did and why they did it is part of the healing process, and of the new fabric of the peace process society. If we can now conduct a national dialogue about both the failure of our politics in creating violent conditions, and the failure of their violence to create politics, then we will have done future generations an immense service.

We have in Ireland a unique parallel to draw on. The silence that descended on both sides after the Civil War persisted, for that haunted generation, to their graves. Thousands lived and died without ever unpicking the unique dilemmas that that fratricidal conflict created. Instead, the next generation was left to brood and to pick up the bits of the puzzle, and the generational paramilitarism that we have had since has many of its roots in this failure. There was neither reconciliation nor redemption after the Civil War, merely a brooding and poisonous silence that ultimately led back into paramilitarism.

In the subtext of Muiris MacConghail's article there were broadcasting notions of exclusion, and equally a bizarre notion that the national broadcaster should operate as an arbitrator of what are suitable current affairs for its listeners -- that somehow the dimensions of free speech in a democratic society should be the dictate of what he calls "RTE senior editorial personnel at the Director General's meeting".

I must say that it all conjures up a concept of journalism much beloved of the folk who ended up fleeing in helicopters from their palace roofs in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

It is a bewildering arrogance to suggest that current affairs be somehow judged on its suitability rather than its relevance, its implications or its current or historical importance.

He opens his article by rhetorically asking what implications the Magee interview will have for "the future direction of RTE's general editorial policy". Perhaps the answer is that it was an attempt to begin filling the unprecedented Section 31 broadcasting vacuum over which Muiris himself so singularly and so loyally served.