Future of Media Commission response a muted sequel to an already overfamiliar story

“What were the last three years all about?” arrives the first message from a media industry contact after the much-postponed release of the Future of Media Commission report and the Government’s accompanying greenlighting of a technical working group to examine reform of television licence fee collection.

This latest working group won’t be a sequel to the commission as such, but yet another rewrite of an overfamiliar story that never seems to get past its own cliffhangers.

In essence, the Government has approved 49 of the 50 recommendations of the commission but rejected its central one — the admittedly surprising verdict that the licence fee should be abolished and public media funding sourced entirely through direct exchequer funding. This proved a plot twist too far.

Believers in efficient government might wonder why the Department of the Taoiseach, which established this commission, didn’t just skip straight to setting up such a working group. It’s not as if the diagnosis of a flawed licence-fee database and collection system, made ever more painful by collapsing commercial revenues, wasn’t made years ago. It’s not as if there was never a possibility the commission would come up with answers that Ministers didn’t like.

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But there was, of course, some logic in tasking a group of otherwise busy people — including chairman Prof Brian MacCraith, who was chairing the High-Level Taskforce on Covid-19 Vaccination throughout much of the same period — to go through the motions of studying every conceivable problem facing the Irish media and broader audiovisual industry, then produce a report that the Government would sit on for a whole year.

The logic was that it put off the day when any real decision has to be made. If it is true that valuable time has been wasted, as Irish media organisations wearily complain it has been, then this is surely less by accident than it is by design.

Many people engaged in this process in good faith, not least the 10-person commission, which became a nine-person one after former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger stepped down in March 2021. This independent group met virtually 25 times between October 2020 and July 2021, held “a number of bilateral meetings with key stakeholders”, attracted 800 submissions to its public consultation and staged six “thematic dialogue” online sessions with varying degrees of technical success. They involved more than 50 panellists ranging from NUJ secretary Séamus Dooley to Blindboy.

This elaborate exercise was itself a franchise reboot of sorts. The commission’s 284-page report was completed in summer 2021, just 3½ years after an Oireachtas communications committee launched its own 321-page report on the future of public service broadcasting. The main recommendation of that report — that the Revenue Commissioners and not An Post should collect the licence fee to crack down on evasion — was also dismissed.

Some of the commission’s approved recommendations — including sticking plaster “interim” funding for RTÉ, the view that TG4 should have independent control of its own Nuacht and measures to give a wider range of news outlets access to public funding — have been welcomed.

But Taoiseach Micheál Martin grimaced on Tuesday at the thought of scraping together as much as €300 million from tax receipts to fund Irish media, before noting the reason why the licence fee had been introduced in the first place: to strengthen the independence from government of its main recipient, the public-service broadcaster RTÉ, and, in theory, ring-fence its funding. Indeed, the push to consign the licence fee to history has most often been made by a political right wing intent on whittling down public-media funding to token, American-style levels.

So why did the Future of Media Commission plump for a “thoughtfully designed” taxation model? Well, it starts by pouring the coldest of water on the idea that a licence fee helps maintain a visible “social contract” between fee-payers and public-service media. In an era when people pay for whatever services they want, a compulsory charge “will be seen by some as anachronistic”, it states, while “another problem” is that it is a regressive tax, with the wealthy paying proportionately less of their income on the annual €160 fee.

It is clear that many fairness issues abound. But as for reforms that have been calmly introduced elsewhere, such as a more equitable and future-proofed licence fee that does not tie eligibility to a specific device, the commission’s conclusion appears to be that this would simply be too hard to do here. Measures to tackle evasion would also deliver limited returns, apparently, with the prospect of additional legal enforcement risking “the spectre of increased public opposition”.

With a fresh promise by the Taoiseach to “overhaul” collection of the licence fee, however, the Government’s intention still seems to be to attempt to solve these conundrums rather than be defeated by them or do anything too radical in response. What the Irish media industry is now asking is “when?”