EITHNE TYNAN
You’re supposed to learn financial prudence at your mother’s knee. She may paraphrase, but in essence she’ll rehearse Mister Micawber’s axiom in David Copperfield – ‘Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19, 19 shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20 ought and six, result misery.’
You practise this principle on your pocket money, forgoing needless expenditure on gobstoppers so as to keep within your means – and in your mother’s good books. Then, when you grow up, you can go to work for RTÉ and forget all that. ‘Annual income £20, annual expenditure whatever you want – it’s taxpayers’ money and you can always ask for more.’
RTÉ released its annual report for 2016 this week, revealing a deficit of €19m ought and six. That’s on revenue of €337m from the licence fee and advertising. It’s a sum that would go a little distance towards providing housing, or getting some of those 600,000-odd people off hospital waiting lists, or easing a few children out of poverty.
Altogether, it’s a sum that could help put the RTÉ current affairs department out of a story or two, if the national broadcaster were minded to be a bit more principled about its use of taxpayers’ money. In its report, RTÉ laments having to spend over €16m on exceptional events including the general election, the Olympics, and ‘the commemoration of the centenary of the Easter Rising’, as RTÉ chair Moya Doherty incorrectly put it in the report.
It was revealed late last year that they spent €2.46m alone on the Easter Monday Centenary concert. It lasted 85 minutes. That’s almost €29,000 a minute. It’s an annual living wage for one person every minute. It’s the price of a decent university education for at least one person every minute.
The annual report points out that ‘a deficit was always anticipated’ for this year. The review by the director-general Dee Forbes points out that in its five-year plan in 2013, RTÉ ‘signalled very clearly that 2016 was a year of exceptional commitments and, without additional public funding would be very challenging’. So what did they do, knowing there were big spending requirements for the year? Did they cut their cloth to suit their measure? Did they consider the ought and six? They did not. They blew money they absolutely did not have on showpiece demonstrations of their clout and hubris. And now, instead of being chastened, they’re complaining about the dearth of ‘additional public funding’. Tellingly enough, the report also boasts about RTÉ’s factual output during the year. They produced programmes about homelessness, about the daily disasters associated with the health service, and about Travellers. All very well-intentioned stuff, but it’s a wonder no one thought it was ironic considering how much public money is being wasted in Montrose.
The BBC this week released the details of its top stars’ salaries, and RTÉ is now under renewed pressure to do the same. The last figures we have are from 2014, when its top ten presenters earned €2.6m between them. That would pay over 100 people a living wage for a year, shared instead among ten. By RTÉ’s lights though it’s smallish money – enough to arrange a €2.46m vanity project at the taxpayers’ expense and still have change. Despite all this transparent extravagance, much of the 184-page annual report consists of whingeing about RTÉ’s ‘unsustainable funding position’ and how successive governments have failed to facilitate the ponying up of more dosh. Earlier this month, Dee Forbes tried to impress on the Oire- achtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment the need to increase the licence fee from €160 to €175.
‘If the TV licence fee had kept pace with inflation since it was last raised, today it would be at €175 per household per year, or 47 cent a day. That is still just over a quarter of the cost of a national newspaper,’ she said. I suppose I’d be accused of sour grapes if I pointed out you have the choice to leave a national newspaper on the shelf, since newspapers are not paid for by taxation. And unlike Statefunded enterprises, newspapers go out of business if they keep spending £20 ought and six on £20 income.
And again, unlike State-funded enterprises, newspapers squander their own money – not exchequer funds that could be diverted to the subjects of a myriad documentaries about under-privilege.
The trouble with public money is that it burns a hole in people’s pockets. RTÉ is not alone in this, but RTÉ does seem to have an unusual case of entitlement about it. It’s a sort of cognitive dissonance, wherein you produce worthy programmes about social problems while wilfully tearing through the State coffers. And it’s nothing short of immoral to do this while examining everyone else’s conscience and not your own. Seriously, RTÉ, get down off that high moral ground this minute, before we stop your pocket money altogether.