RTE set to cut €50m from wages and spending

RTÉ IS to make cuts of over €50 million to its budget next year to avoid a deficit, its director general told a Dáil committee yesterday.

The cuts, which total 10 per cent of its operating costs, will include shelving plans to bring Diaspora TV to the UK next year.

Cathal Goan told the Dáil Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the station took €50 million plus out of the planned budget for 2009 to ensure it would not go into arrears. Cutting the diaspora TV project, which was to be provided to Irish people abroad via Freesat in the UK, would save €2 million a year.

The station had anticipated a budget surplus of €11 million this year, he said, but was now hoping to break even in 2008 by making cuts worth €27 million. This would involve reductions in expenditure in every area, he said.

RTÉ had lost considerable income from TV advertising, virtually all in the last four months of this year, the committee was told, and very many painful decisions had already been made.

RTÉ's chief financial officer, Conor Hayes, told the committee "gain sharing" had been replaced by "pain sharing".

Next year, they hoped €21 million would be saved through personnel savings, Mr Hayes said. Over €10 million could be saved through a freeze on increments and a postponement of the implementation of the national wage agreement, he said, and this was being discussed with unions.

Senior managers had already agreed to a wage cut of up to 17.5 per cent and negotiations were underway with 360 staff at management grade for cuts of between 5 per cent and 17.5 per cent. Some €29 million in savings would be made across the board through trimming in all programmes.

"There is no area that is being left untouched," Mr Hayes said.

Clare Duignan, director of programming at the station, said they were trying hard not to remove programmes from the schedule, but were asking people if they could make cuts in certain areas such as on travelling out of Dublin or on the number of shooting days required for a programme. From this month, there would be a cut in the numbers of floor staff working on the Late Late Show and one camera operator would be lost from Tubridy Tonight, she said.

However, plans to introduce a digital television service would go ahead at a cost of €111 million. Mr Hayes said the station would be putting together an entire transmission structure and would have to borrow "for the first time in 20 years" to fund it.

By next May, 69 per cent of the population would have digital coverage, he said, and by June 2010, the figure would be 89 per cent.

The project will not be completed countrywide until the end of 2012, because of an agreement with the BBC not to introduce the new technology in Border areas until the British stations are ready.

Once the technology is in place, householders will have to buy set-top boxes to receive transmissions.

Mr Hayes said he hoped these could be brought in for under €50. He told the committee that RTÉ would broadcast simultaneously on the current analog system and on digital until the end of 2012.