RTÉ licence fee is unsustainable morally

HOUSEHOLD charge. Laptop levy. Culture tax. Non-devicedependent charge. Broadcast charge. All different phrases, all meaning the same thing – a new TV licence which, if the mandarins have their way, will now be increased from €160 to €175 a year, with the added sting in the tail that it will also be linked to inflation.

The TV licence fee is the third rail of Irish broadcasting. Numerous politicians have tried to fix it and failed dismally, usually after receiving a monstering from a general public which isn’t keen on paying the tax as it stands, let alone increasing the size of it.

But the establishment, whether it’s RTÉ’s leadership, the politicians, or the civil service, keeps coming up with increasingly ingenious ways to trying to relieve us of more money.

Last week saw two major developments in the slow-motion car crash that is the vexed issue of the licence fee.

A Government report, ahead of the upcoming debate about the topic in the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, recommended a complete overhaul of the system as it currently stands, and advocated a ‘household tax’ which would force even those without a TV to pay up.

Then senior civil servant Mark Griffin appeared at the Dáil Public Accounts Committee and admitted that, when it comes to RTÉ: “We in the department have a real concern about the future funding of the company. I would say the TV licence model is broken. I’m not sure whether it can be fixed.”

On that last sentence, Mr Griffin is undoubtedly correct. The model is undoubtedly broken, as he said. But it’s also utterly anachronistic and virtually impossible to enforce without the inevitable bad optics of a pensioner spending a night in jail because they couldn’t pay the fine which arrives when you can’t pay the fee.

Frankly, asking people who don’t even think about RTÉ to subsidise the company is both unjust and nonsensical.

It also shows how out of touch with the realities of the current media landscape so many of the so-called ‘experts’ seem to be.

We have now entered a vast, digital, global village where people watch American news channels, enjoy foreign programming, and are happy to get their information from their phone and their entertainment from Netflix.

There are countless apps out there which open up a whole planet’s worth of broadcast material, and the idea that consumers should pay for their device, be it a laptop or tablet, then pay an annual subscription to the likes of Sky or Netflix, and then, on top of all of that, pay a legally mandated levy to prop up a product they don’t even use is a hard sell at the best of times – and, as you may have noticed, these are not the best of times.

For all the talk of the resurgent economy, money is still tight and consumers have become smarter with their spare cash. This means that many of them are voting with their wallets to pay for the things they want, not the things the establishment thinks they should want. We’re also living in a world where people expect to receive their information free of charge.

That is why what was once known as the ‘media landscape’ has become a barren wasteland littered with the corpses of defunct newspapers and media organisations.

It was always a tough world and print media, in particular, has taken an absolute battering across the West. That already parlous situation isn’t helped by the fact that Google and Facebook, perhaps the two biggest news providers the world has ever seen, are free to cannibalise verified news content from professional media sources, and then sell their own ads on the back of that.

In other words, the entire market has changed beyond belief in the space of a few short years.

SHOULD proceeds from the so-called ‘culture tax’ – who thinks of these names? – be distributed among print organisations, as well as TV3? It won’t, and nor should it. If you can’t stay competitive without State-funded life-support, then maybe it is simply time to pull the plug.

That RTÉ is in big trouble is not in doubt. Forced to sell off some of the family silver in the shape of its Donnybrook campus, which may or may not raise the €50m it claims, even then most of that will be swallowed by redundancy fees and €50m doesn’t last long in today’s broadcasting climate.

It also faces two virtually insurmountable obstacles – practical and cultural.

The practical element can be gleaned from the mass protests against water charges. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the anti-water charge activists, they proved that when a critical mass of enough people refuse to go along with something, there is actually very little the authorities can do.

Will we see inspectors descend on apartment blocks and demand proof that the inhabitants don’t even have a laptop or a tablet in their flat? How the hell do you enforce something like that?

The other obstacle, the culture question, goes back to the fact that we no longer have a culture of paying for things we didn’t order, don’t want, and will never use.

If people are unhappy with their Sky or Netflix service, they can cancel their subscription. If someone is unhappy with their RTÉ service, there’s absolutely nothing they can do.

But the idea of being forced to pay the guts of 200 quid a year to watch endless repeats and ‘Late Late Show’ interviews with the latest book-flogging celebrity is one which will simply not fly.

Rather than trying to force the population to pay for something many of us don’t want, RTÉ will have to, sooner or later, start to look at some sort of subscription service.

As things stand, they get both the licence fee and the vast advertising revenue they derive from a market they control, yet still they look for more money from the public coffers.

That is unsustainable, both morally and commercially.

But it has been interesting to note the one aspect of this debate which been glaring in its absence – why don’t the Montrose mandarins ask us how they could improve their product?

Why don’t they endeavour to make it a service that people don’t resent paying for?

The answer is simple – until the politicians, civil servants and senior station executives remember that RTÉ actually exists for our benefit, and not the other way around, then this is an issue which will continue to swirl around the plug hole of public debate.