ABSTRACT
The sixteen years between 1932 and 1948 were a period of uninterrupted rule by Fianna Fail, the party which had not been founded until 1926 and had not entered the Dail until five years before it took power. It would be misleading, however, to assume that this extraordinarily long period of single-party government was synonymous with a period of quietism in the media. The establishment of the Irish Press in November 1931 by the leader of Fianna Fail, Eamon de Valera, served notice on the existing media establishment that things would never be the same again. The outbreak of war in 1939 created a whole new series of tensions between media generally and the government. Towards the end of the period, radio, for the first time, began to come into its own as a public service with a much broader remit than had hitherto been the case.
