Widespread hostility RTÉ faces is bad for democracy

THERE was a series of remarkable revelations last week from former minister for communications Alex White about his time in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition. Reflecting back on his time at cabinet, which ended last year, he said: ‘I am still struck by the level of hostility displayed by members of the Government towards RTÉ. The chances of their being an increase in the TV licence, even a modest increase, were zero.’

White, a Labour politician who sat at the cabinet table between 2014 and 2016, added that when it came to RTÉ: ‘It was made clear to me that I would have no support either from Labour or Fine Gael.’ He said the attitude was: ‘Why should we give RTÉ money when they want to kill us?’ White, a former RTÉ employee, found this attitude ‘dispiriting’.

And this week it was revealed that the director general of RTÉ has told Communications Minister Denis Naughten: ‘Things are much worse, Minister, RTÉ is in a truly critical place.’ This is not just dispiriting it is also bad for democracy to have the public service broadcaster treated this way.

The bizarre situation for RTÉ is that the cabinet hates the national broadcaster for doing its job – but the most severe opponents of the Government also hate RTÉ!

Witness the venom heaped on the national broadcaster and individual journalists from some water-charge protesters. In truth, RTÉ can’t win.

Unfortunately, it is the cabinet that decides if the TV licence fee should rise, so no wonder there hasn’t been an increase in nearly a decade.

At times RTÉ seems afraid to point out that it doesn’t get all of the €160 TV licence fee – only 80% of it goes to the 25 different services that RTÉ runs. The rest goes to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, TG4 and An Post, which gets €10 for every licence collected.

For example RTÉ Radio One, the biggest and most popular station in the country, gets 4c a day from each licence payer. That’s less than €15 per year. Radio is largely paid for by advertising, which is only generated because of a station’s popularity. It baffles me that people have no trouble shelling out as much as to €30 to watch a single boxing match on Sky Sports – just under one fifth of the annual TV licence fee!

Brendan O’Carroll recently made the case for RTÉ from the stage of the Grand Canal Theatre, reminding the audience that comparisons with the BBC were odious because the Beeb gets more than €4bn from the British licence fee while RTÉ gets just €178m.

The reason he wanted the BBC to produce his hit series was because it could afford it!

RTÉ, in fairness, does get great praise, especially from the print media when it runs events such as the Easter Rising centenary celebrations and Cruinniú Na Cásca, but that praise doesn’t butter any parsnips!