State broadcaster struggles with challenges of the modern world

Perhaps it would be simpler to scrap the licence fee and assist public service media directly from the Exchequer, writes Colm McCarthy

Ireland, for better or worse, is not a planet

THE latest revelation of money troubles at RTE is hardly a surprise. The state broadcaster is dual-funded, through the TV licence fee and whatever advertising revenue it can generate. Both income streams have weakened, through evasion of the licence fee and leakage of ad revenue to the social media platforms. RTE’s director general, Dee Forbes, was not exaggerating when she warned of an existential threat to public service broadcasting, but the private radio and TV stations, which rely almost entirely on advertising, are in an even worse pickle. They get almost nothing from the licence fee which yields €180m per annum to RTE. Some are mostly music stations but several also deliver news and current affairs and they have been laying off staff. The print media have lost both readers and advertisers to the online platforms and the threat is not just to RTE but to all traditional vehicles of broadcast and print journalism.

The Government reiterated last Thursday its willingness to consider some form of successor to the licence fee. Since television can now be accessed through laptops and smartphones and may shortly be available through the buckle on your belt, the definition of a TV set just doesn’t work any more.

Since the TV licence fee had become almost like a poll tax — virtually every household is liable for €160 per annum — it was always a regressive tax. Rather than agonise over some new definition of a receiving apparatus, it might be simpler to just scrap it and support public service broadcasting at RTE and other radio and TV stations directly from the Exchequer.

The notion that the €160 was akin to a subscription has been a pretence since the RTE monopoly was abandoned in the late 1980s.

The Government also announced plans last week to institute a new regulatory regime for political advertising on social media. Personalised ads tailored by Facebook and others to match their unmonitored mining of users’ data is perceived by many as a threat to democracy, facilitating politics-in-the-dark as well as the fabled Russian bot armies during the Trump and Brexit votes in 2016. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, announced last week a simple ban — Twitter will no longer accept political advertising. Which lines him up with RTE, all other Irish and UK broadcasters and most around Europe, where political advertising is simply prohibited. Why not just apply the same prohibition to social media here, in time for the next election? Since 1992, when the UN Climate Change Convention was agreed in Rio de Janeiro, territorial production-based emission limits have been a component of international policy and have been given concrete form in the European Union. Carbon emissions in Europe have fallen but not by enough to offset rapid growth in the developing world, especially China, and in countries which have opted out of the international effort, including the USA.

Ireland will miss its 2020 targets (so will Germany) but the overall performance in Europe has been better than in China and the USA, which between them are responsible for about four times the European emission total. If serious risks of climate damage are to be avoided the key players will be China, the USA and Europe, responsible for more than half of total world emissions between them and sufficiently dominant in international trade to demand compliance from others.

Ireland, for better or worse, is not a planet and accordingly does not have its own atmosphere. The greatest failing in Irish policy down the years has not been the failure to stay inside the 2020 target: above-average growth since 1990, including population growth, has overtaken the fixed targets, and they were agreed when dairy output was constrained by milk quotas, abandoned in April 2015. The greater failure has been the absence of serious input to the evolution of policy at EU level. EU policy matters not just because Europe’s own emissions need to fall further but because of the pivotal role the EU can play in promoting better policies in China, where policy reform is under way, and in a post-Trump USA. Trump is on the record to the effect that the noise from windmills causes cancer and that climate change is a hoax, got up by China to damage the USA. His defeat in next year’s election would be a climate policy in itself.

The European Commission has been exploring policy initiatives focused on raising the price of carbon emissions to accompany its national targets. Economists have never been keen on quantified national targets, partly because they are measured in a way which can create problems for international trade. The emissions associated with the consumption of oil from Saudi Arabia get measured in Ireland and are not counted as part of Saudi emissions. But if Irish butter ends up in Saudi supermarkets, the emissions also get counted in Ireland. Countries which are big producers and exporters of steel, like China, complain that Europe has outsourced some of its emissions to China, whose emission figures measured on a consumption rather than a production basis are not quite as big as they seem.

Speaking after the launch of the progress report on the Government’s climate action plan, the Taoiseach made some interesting comments about climate policy which have not been widely reported. This is what he said:

“I think as we get beyond 2030 and we get into much more ambitious targets than we currently have, I think, on an international level, we’re going to have to consider whether we treat food differently because we are a country that exports 90pc of the food that we produce. We’re a country of five million people that feeds 50 [million] and yet all that food production gets accounted for in Ireland as a contribution to global warming, but that food production is going to have to happen, it’s going to have to happen somewhere.

“We’re going to need to look at that on an international level and see if we need to treat food production differently to the way we treat transport or electricity and that we can actually move fully over to the renewables and away from fossil fuels.”

The Taoiseach’s remarks acknowledge that Ireland is a victim of an inconsistent approach to measuring and controlling emissions. Nobody suggests that Saudi Arabia should respond to inadequate taxes on automotive fuels in importing countries by closing lowcost and efficient Saudi oilfields, and it makes no more sense to constrain efficient dairy producers in Ireland. Production of fossil fuels in Saudi Arabia is controlled with taxes in Ireland.

The European Commission is considering consumer-end taxes for the aviation industry, a sizeable emitter and one which has led a charmed life, with no taxes on jet kerosene and no VAT. The Commission is considering a carbon tax on jet fuel, which generates per-litre emissions comparable to diesel. But our Department of Transport has been quoted to the effect that Ireland will oppose this initiative. If it is in the national interest that efficient sectors be unconstrained by production quotas, that points to consumer-end taxes, including taxes on jet kerosene in the EU — and on butter consumption in Saudi Arabia.