Reward ALL media who do State service
DURING his brief tenure in Cabinet, JJ Walsh – who was quite the piece of work, as we would discover later when he joined the fascists – stood up in the Dáil and doomed us all to paying for broadcasting in perpetuity. He was the Cumann na nGaedheal minister for Posts & Telegraphs, and he was introducing the 1926 legislation that, among other things, would establish the licence fee, with a legally enforceable penalty for non-compliance. And as you’ll see, he didn’t have much faith in people’s willingness to pay up.
‘We find that in the absence of an Act to enforce the payment of fees, there are very few who are willing to pay anything. Most people want everything for nothing, and at the same time they want the privilege of abusing the State for not doing more for them. They cannot have it both ways,’ he said, rather crankily I think you’ll agree.
The wireless licence would fund 2RN, the new national radio station that had recently begun life just across the Liffey in the nowvanished Little Denmark Street. And already, 2RN was complaining that it couldn’t put out good radio because there wasn’t enough money and that too many people were enjoying the station without paying for it.
Listeners were finding the station a bit dull, and anyway many of them had radio sets already and had been listening to London in peace – and for nothing – before ever JJ Walsh dreamt up a way of forcing them to pay for what would become RTÉ.
Fast-forward a dizzying 97 years and we’re still having the same conversation – or at least we were until last June. For decades people have been asking if everyone should have to pay for RTÉ, including people who don’t watch it or listen to it. And how much of its output should we be paying for? And how much should we have to pay for it?
Then, since June, we’ve been finding out – or trying to find out at least – just how much of our money RTÉ has been wasting. And now, critically, thousands of people don’t want to pay for it at all.
RTÉ’s public-service output is first-rate. There are programmes and schemes that are important to the common good, whether we like them or not. Its news and current affairs journalism is almost always excellent, Morning Ireland and Prime Time especially. I’ve seen people who don’t have a word of Irish chest-thumping about the importance of TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta. Liveline – bear with me here, and pipe down Mr O’Leary – has become an indispensable shoulder to cry on for above half the nation. And personally I would not part with Lyric FM because… Marty Whelan.
But we’ve been paying millions for the privilege of listening to Ray D’Arcy – and indeed Ryan Tubridy, left, while he lasted – talking about themselves and swallowing saliva. We’re paying for reruns of Shortland Street and Dr Phil. We’re paying for 2FM. We’ve complained about this for years, before ever we found out about the car allowances and the exclusive club memberships and the unvouched allowances and the unending strata of overpaid managers – and no one shouted stop. Why are we still here?
It’s been well-established that the funding model for RTÉ is anachronistic, although there are contradictory reasons for thinking so. Every year without fail, the former director general Dee Forbes whipped out the begging bowl and complained that the licence fee system was ‘broken’. Too many people were ‘getting everything for nothing’, as JJ Walsh put it. And every year Ms Forbes was allowed ample time to ventilate her money worries in public, and was listened to, to the extent that in some quarters it came to be believed that licence-fee defaulters were the reason RTÉ was broke. It was An Post’s fault.
Now we know better. It’s just been champagne and flip-flops all the way down.
Of course the waste of public money is not confined to the national broadcaster. Once State funding comes into the picture, zeroes get added willy-nilly. TDs and senators – including those who are members of the Media Committee and the Public Accounts Committee that have been grilling RTÉ’s top brass – are themselves no strangers to unvouched expenses. We taxpayers are like a pinata: they keep whacking us and money keeps coming out.
But although people can be a bit pious about State-funded publicservice media, there’s a consensus that we need it, whether we like it or not. However, the principle, as established, dates from a time when people were depending on one broadcaster, and Éamon de Valera was fretting that there would be moral dissolution without it. People have choice now, so why does RTÉ get the monopoly? Why can’t all responsible journalism get a piece of the pie, including – and I think we’ve at last reached the point where a person can say this without being laughed at – newspapers? Whenever people talk about public-service journalism, they mean broadcasting, as if a taxpayer-funded newspaper could only ever be Pravda or some kind of Fianna Fáil organ. But the problem is that nonsense is proliferating on social media; you can get your conspiracy theories for free but you have to pay for the facts. It’s not good.
THE Future of Media Commission’s report last year recommended a platform-neutral media fund to support all kinds of public service ‘content providers’ (as we’re regrettably now called), and the Government has pledged to put this in place.
Unfortunately, the Government did not accept the commission’s recommendation to do away with the licence fee. It ran scared of ‘the risk of actual or perceived political interference in media independence’. Given what we know now, and with licence revenue disappearing down the toilet, that looks more than ever like a mistake.
But it’s now long past time for RTÉ to be separated into its constituent parts. The State should fund its strictly public-service obligations – news and current affairs; the Irish-language output; cultural programming of the kind no one watches but you kind of have to have it; and Nationwide, which no one watches unless they know someone on it – together with the public-service offerings of other media. And the supposedly ‘commercial’ elements of RTÉ, which are supposed to survive on their own money but more often don’t, should be cut loose, to sink or swim with the sharks.
RTÉ has been abusing its privilege, and then having the nerve to abuse us for not doing more for it. As JJ Walsh might say, they cannot have it both ways.