At the time of writing it is nearly

At the time of writing it is nearly a week since the order prohibiting interviews with members of Sinn Féin and Republican Sinn Féin, as well as various proscribed paramilitary organisations, under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, was allowed to lapse. The world has not turned on its axis, nor has the landscape changed. The weather has been mixed but today is mild and pleasant. A few strange voices have been heard on the radio, and an unfamiliar beard has appeared on TV. It was later identified as that of Mr Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Féin.

Some of the interviews which have been done with members of Sinn Féin have been weak, with neither the broadcasters nor their subjects distinguishing themselves. Others have been more interesting and useful. Nothing has taken place which either should or would raise even a storm in a teacup. And there have been no wonderfully obvious benefits. It is just about exactly the way that anyone with a bit of intelligence would have predicted.

But I believe that there will be benefits in the longer term. Authoritarian ideologists and legislators like to tell people what they can listen to, look at, read, see, do, learn from. They want to tell broadcasters and journalists who they can talk to. Because they know best. And so they insist on doing other people’s thinking for them. Which is what the Catholic Church did here for years, in the process disabling generations of Irish people from any kind of independent thinking on a range of moral, social and political issues. The logic behind Section 31 was fundamentally the same: we can decide what you are allowed to hear in relation to the conflict in Northern Ireland. We will not allow you to come to your own judgements about what Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness or Ruairí O Bradaigh have to say. Why? Because you are not capable of making those judgements.

The irony is that the contempt for people implicit in this authoritarian view of the world has a kind of self-promoting momentum: the greater the extent to which you censor radical or divergent points of view and deny people legitimate access to information, the less capable they actually become of making fine judgements. The Catholic Church constructed an ignorant, bigoted, intolerant society in the Republic precisely because they effectively limited the free flow of information, ideas, creativity, discussion and debate. The tendency is an old one: reduce issues of moral complexity down to a simple set of Commandments. In broadcasting the effect was simply crazy. George Bush could appear nightly justifying the massacre of hundreds, even thousands of Iraqis in the Gulf War. Later, Slobodan Milosovich and Radavan Karadvich could rationalise the genocide of Bosnian-Muslims and the existence of concentration camps. And at the level of farce, people could see Lorena Bobbitt explain just exactly why she chopped her husband’s dick off. And yet there was supposed to be some essential moral point in keeping Gerry Adams off the air!

Anyone who reads Hot Press will know that I am utterly, adamantly opposed to the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence and murder. I believe that it is profoundly reprehensible, morally wrong as well as tactically reckless. But to say that doesn’t make it any less important for me – or anyone else in this cruelly divided society – to understand the historic and sometimes enduring conditions which ensure a continuing level of support for the IRA among Northern nationalists in particular.

I am glad and relieved that a significant obstacle to that understanding is now gone. And that is the bottom line on Section 31.

• Niall Stokes