1. Introduction

This report is the result of a research project jointly commissioned by the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland and the National Disability Authority. The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland ("BCI") was created by statute and has responsibility for, among other things, the regulation of radio and television in Ireland. The National Disability Authority ("NDA") was created by statute and has responsibility for collaborating in research projects and activities on issues relating to disability.

In the public good, and in particular with a view to advancing knowledge that will assist in improving the lives of people with disabilities, the BCI and the NDA commissioned a series of parallel research projects into attitudes to such people in radio and television broadcasting in the Republic of Ireland.

In order to gain an objective understanding of how people with disabilities are currently represented on Irish broadcast television and radio, the BCI/NDA commissioned a research team from the Centre for Society, Information and the Media (SIM) at the School of Communications, DCU, to conduct a content analysis of Irish broadcasting. The research addressed the following questions with regard to the representation of people with disabilities in Irish Broadcasting:

• What proportion of television and radio programming contain representations of people with disabilities?
• What proportion of all people on television and radio programming had a disability?
• What proportion of programming is disability-focussed and what proportion is mainstream?
• How many different people/characters (in the case of fictional/dramatic content) contribute to the representation of people with disabilities?
• In which genres of programmes are people with disabilities most and least often represented e.g. sport, news etc.?
• In programmes that represent people with disabilities, what is the level of appearance of the person/people with disabilities e.g. minor, major roles?
• What types of disability are represented?
• How does the representation occur (i.e. stereotyped, etc.)?
• What types of occupations are fulfilled by a person/people with a disability?
• To what extent is the experience of disability relevant to that person's role as represented in a programme?
• To what extent is the experience of disability relevant to the occupation of the person represented in a programme?
• In which types of role are people with disabilities most and least often represented?
• Is there a difference between Irish programming content and imported programming content? And if so, what is the nature of this difference?

The questions were in large part based on a set of criteria devised for a similar piece of research carried out in the UK in 2005 on behalf of OFCOM, the British office of communications regulation.^[2] The BCI, NDA and the DCU Research Team customised the questions to take account of the broader focus of this research. OFCOM's research examined actual appearances of people with disabilities on television broadcasting only, whereas this research examined both radio and television, and examined all "references" to disability in addition to actual appearances by people with disabilities in these media. Thus, questions were added to take account of programmes where disability was verbally referred to without featuring a person with a disability. For the most part these questions paralleled questions relating to programming which did feature a person with a disability:

• What proportion of television and radio programming contain references to disability?
• Which genres of programmes contain the most/least references to disability?
• What tone characterised the reference to disability?
• For programming featuring references to disability but not actual people with disabilities, code the importance of those references within the programme item.
• Is there a difference between Irish programming content and imported programming content in this regard? And if so, what is the nature of this difference?
• Did discussions of disability play a major or minor role in the programme?

The structure of the first part of this report addresses these questions at a largely quantitative level (that is, in terms of numbers of representations). Section 2 below outlines the methodology adopted for the research project and more detailed information relating to the content analysis questionnaire and the manner in which it was applied can be found in Appendix 1 and 2. Section 3 outlines the key findings of the content analysis and Section 4 teases out any broader conclusions deriving from those results. The last section (Section 5) is a discourse analysis of the sample which examines the manner in which disability and people with disabilities are discussed and referred to across Irish broadcast media, drawing on examples from the research sample.