RTÉ is on a property goldmine, so it should be weaned off TV licence fee
Community stations in dire straits as State broadcaster grows fat on OUR money
Does RTÉ deserve a licence fee increase? It certainly seems to think so. Director General Dee Forbes said this week: ‘The licence fee is 40c a day. I think it’s incredible value for money… quite honestly I think it should be double that.’ Later, she seemed to backtrack a little, stating: ‘I’m not for one minute calling for a doubling of a licence fee.’
The RTÉ boss had let slip a PRunfriendly, Montrose-tinted view of the world that didn’t go down well with the cash-strapped public. Forty cent a day might not sound like much. But €160 a year is a lot for most families, never mind double that.
Ryan Tubridy wouldn’t have any difficulty paying it out of his €495,000 annual pay – nor Joe Duffy on €417,000. The 89 RTÉ staff on over €100,000 a year could easily stump up their licence fee. And the average RTÉ employee, paid €67,000 in 2015, would be okay. But private sector workers with half that sum to live on might just have a problem.
The €160 fee is the same sum that nearly caused a revolution over water charges. RTÉ’s case was also undermined by the €75m windfall (gross) it is about to receive from the sale of 8.6 acres of its Dublin campus. With another 23.5 acres left ‘in the bank’, presumably worth many millions more, it is hardly in dire straits.
As with many semi-states, RTÉ ‘puts on the poor mouth’ after racking up a small annual loss. RTÉ also wants 200 job cuts, through retirement and voluntary redundancies, no doubt involving pay-offs that will gobble up much of the windfall. The broadcaster said money raised in the sale will also be used to ‘refresh’ RTÉ buildings and replace out-of-date equipment.
The implication is that RTÉ has been doling out obscene pay to stars, while its equipment and offices fell into near-obsolescence.
Incredibly, pay used to be even higher. At one point, Pat Kenny earned €950,000 a year. And this, presumably, was on ‘the watch’ of RTÉ managers, a disproportionate number of whom apparently get over €150,000. Maybe that’s why they didn’t baulk at Pat’s pay.
He decided to leave anyway. The very able Seán O’Rourke took over and attracted more listeners, making Pat’s €950k-a-year ‘golden handcuffs’ look like pretty poor management. Not surprisingly,
RTÉ didn’t get much sympathy over its financial ‘plight’ this week. RTÉ pleading poverty is a bit like a plump, rich Victorian kid in a new sailor suit, who strays into the wrong part of town and drops a huge lollipop he had been licking in the gutter. When he looks to the starving street urchins for sympathy, he’s disappointed to get only blank stares.
The resources of the other starving media ‘urchins’ have long been cut far closer to the bone than RTÉ’s ever will be.
TV3 is one of those urchins, albeit better-fed than most. However, it doesn’t own some of the most valuable real estate in Ireland – a bit of which can be sold off for €75m whenever money is scarce. Instead, it operates out of an industrial estate near Tallaght in Dublin 24. I was there to be interviewed a few years ago, waiting in its version of RTÉ’s hospitality suite, which was then a couch in the corridor. There wasn’t enough room for all five guests, so two had to perch on the arms of the couch. Our host Aidan Cooney, who had presented the football show the night before, asked all five of us if we would like a cup of coffee and then went off and made it himself. RTÉ could – and may well have to – learn something from this ability to make the most of scarce resources.
The broadcaster points out that, unlike TV3, it also has two orchestras to run and restrictions on how much advertising it can accept. Yet TV3 has claimed in the past that RTÉ’s ‘dual-funding’ model means it can’t compete on a level playing field. Most public service broadcasters receive either a licence fee income or commercial revenue.
It’s seen as dysfunctional to have both. Because with that much licence money, RTÉ can charge less for ads than it otherwise might, and outbid them for popular overseas programmes.
The public service remit that earns RTÉ €179m a year from licence fees is also pretty vague.
Much of it is what any broadcaster would do anyway – recognise Irish culture, connect with its audience, not discriminate on the basis of gender and reach out to younger and regional audiences. The most expensive RTÉ shows, including Dancing With The Stars, Love/Hate and Fair City are popular but can hardly be called public service broadcasting. Nor can reality shows like the Voice Of Ireland, Dragons’ Den or Don’t Tell The Bride, all good entertainment but typical of any commercial broadcaster. RTÉ’s credentials as a public service broadcaster were questioned this week as it shifted its Saturday schedule, including the evening news slot, for the BBC show All Round To Mrs Brown.
I don’t question the generally excellent RTÉ content – I’m just asking how much of it is deserving of licence fee support as public service broadcasting, what is that anyway, and could this money be better spent elsewhere?
But Mrs Brown is a far cry from the wall-to-wall factual content screened by America’s Public Broadcasting Service.
IrishTV arguably has more public service credentials than RTÉ. Yet this channel, which brings local stories to our global diaspora, is in examinership – over less money than RTÉ spent on four episodes of Love/Hate.
Community television stations have also been in dire straits over what are paltry sums by RTÉ standards. The Broadcasting Authority’s Sound & Vision fund receives 7% of licence revenue to fund programmes of cultural and historical merit, including community television. But community stations must compete with RTÉ and other broadcasters for these grants. This leads to a situation where most community TV schedules are produced with little or no budget.
I have to declare an interest here as I was involved in Dublin Community Television. When the grants dried up the station was temporarily wound down in 2013 over a funding shortfall that amounted to little more than RTÉ’s €357,000 taxi budget for the same year. DCTV is back but its experience begs the question – is there a better way to spend licence money than pumping it into RTÉ’s exorbitant pay and pricey programming? It has plenty of land to sell, the proceeds of which would help wean it off licence fees. More fee money could then go via grants to all stations, including RTÉ, to pay for real public service broadcasting – and not so Mrs Brown can replace the Nine O’Clock News.