Who would have thought it? In the week after the Government delivers free healthcare to the over-70s, a frail if somewhat overweight pensioner from Donnybrook pops up first in the queue.
Some 75 years after it came into the world, RTE is in need of some urgent medical care. The broadcaster itself has been talking of the need for a massive transfusion, but among the less-well-inclined the talk has been of amputations and the removal of non-essential organs.
Ironically, the fate of the patient lies in the hands of a Government Minister from Fianna Fail, that other 75-year-old veteran of Irish public life, and one which has been at war with RTE for much of their shared histories.
The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Sile de Valera, effectively opted for a holding strategy this week. She allowed the broadcaster a measured transfusion of funds by granting a licence fee increase of £14.50 instead of the £50 RTE was seeking. And she left bigger and more serious questions to another day. Another day after the next election, presumably.
The patient's response to this week's course of treatment was to babble uncontrollably on the airwaves for a few days. Well-wishers purred sympathetically and enemies sniggered in the background, but that's to be expected. The rest of us can only sit and watch TV. That is, if there is anything to watch.
Take today's TV schedules, for example. RTE 1's bland diet includes films you've surely seen before - Wall Street, Plenty, The Cruel Sea - and reams of cheap imports, of the calibre of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: the TV Show. (Yeah, right, as the kids would say, that's so five minutes ago.) Apart from the news, the weather and the Angelus, the only Irish programming is the State-sanctioned gambling provided by Fame and Fortune.
Over on Network 2, there's The X Files, NYPD Blue (how old is that?) and other imports. A bit of GAA and golf appears to be the extent of the home-produced programming. RTE's motto seems to be an adaptation of the old Waltons radio slogan: "If you're going to watch rubbish and re-runs, then make sure you watch them on an Irish station."
"It is scarcely possible to imagine Irish life without RTE broadcasting" begins the station's submission for a licence fee increase. But, leaving aside the cheaper medium of radio, just what is so Irish about RTE television?
Can the service that brought us Home and Away and Friends really justify the following po-faced canard contained in its submission: "Now, when enforced emigration seems at last consigned to Irish history, will we choose to emigrate mentally and culturally to London or Manchester, to New York or Hollywood or the Australian suburbs every time we sit down to view in our front rooms?"
Manchester? Didn't RTE broadcast Coronation Street for decades without a whimper of self-doubt, until it was snaffled by TV3? Point to the dearth of home produced drama, or the lack of resources for current affairs programming, and executives in Donnybrook will inevitably attribute the blame to the Government's failure to increase the licence fee since 1996. Faced with limited resources, RTE has, by and large, opted for cheap and popular over worthy and expensive.
There are several noteworthy features to the current debate on RTE's financial woes. The first is that RTE is the classic curate's egg, a mixture of good and bad. On the semi-State scale, it is probably better than CIE, worse than the ESB. Most of its staff are committed and professional in their work, but in some areas the "job-for-life" mentality of the Civil Service still pervades.
The service that ushered in the millennium by showing the sweat trickling down Joe Dolan's chest, or that broadcast the same edition of the Challenging Times quiz programme twice without noticing, is capable of making brilliant programmes.
And even when the programmes aren't brilliant, they can still sometimes hold the national interest. Few had a good word to say about the recent hagiography of Des O'Malley, for example, but at least they looked at it.
A second feature of the debate is that everyone has an agenda. TV3's is obvious, but less apparent are the factors influencing newspaper comment.
Newspapers compete in the same advertising market as radio and television. Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky TV, and Sir Anthony O'Reilly, whose multi-media business empire is increasingly involved in telecommunications, own the newspapers that have been most critical of RTE. The list of those who would gain from a debilitated national broadcaster is long.
There is, of course, nothing new about RTE's latest run-in with Government, as John Horgan's recent study of the Irish media demonstrates. Sile de Valera's grandad Eamon inaugurated the television service in 1961 by worrying aloud about the "decadence and dissolution" it would bring. The government and church frequently interfered with the new service, especially after The Late Late Show "invented" sex after 1962.
For a time in the 1980s when Ray Burke held the communications portfolio, it seemed that RTE was at war with Fianna Fail. As the Flood tribunal has discovered, Burke made numerous interventions which hobbled the State broadcaster and benefited his friends in the private sector.
In claiming to "level the playing pitch", he did raise legitimate questions about RTE's monopoly and its alleged abuse of this dominant position, but his actions proved a disaster for all concerned. Century Radio collapsed, TV3 took years to get off the ground, and RTE developed the financial problems that continue to this day.
It took the broadcaster a decade, from 1986 to 1996, to secure an increase of £8 in the licence fee, and this money was immediately swallowed up in the costs of starting up the Irish-language programming that has since become TG4.
RTE is a public service broadcaster, but we don't really know what that means. It gets two-thirds of its income from advertising and one-third from the licence fee, but sees nothing wrong with promotional giveaways and sponsorships in its programmes. It tries to be all things to all people - heavyweight and serious in its political coverage, hip and trendy on 2FM and Network 2, and global through its website.
Indeed, in some ways it is forced to be all things to all people. Coverage of the Fianna Fail ardfheis last year cost RTE £40,000, not counting the cost of the ratings drop such a porker would cause in the middle of a prime-time schedule. Whether it's regional coverage or sub-titling of programmes or broadcasting for refugees, RTE is expected to cover all the bases.
It sees the future in the new technology of digital broadcasting, but that doesn't come cheap. Much of the new funding that would accrue from a £50 licence fee increase it hopes to spend on digital channels. But no politician wants to put their name to something that could turn out to be the next Heaven's Gate. Far better to keep the patient on the drip with small licence increases.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)