RTÉ's lost TV licence fee income: What would its €3.2m share have paid for?

RTÉ’s self-inflicted wound continues to haemorrhage, with almost €3.7 million bleeding away from television licence fee revenue since the Ryan Tubridy payments scandal, the associated uproar and some ambiguous noises from senior politicians about whether or not people should bother renewing their licence.

Summer cost-of-living pressures, demographic changes and pre-existing ambivalence towards RTÉ may also have exacerbated the fall in lower sales and renewals this year compared with last. But, by any reckoning, the notorious “tripartite agreement” between RTÉ, Renault and Tubridy looks set to cost a multiple of those previously undeclared payments to the former Late Late presenter.

So what would this “lost” funding have paid for at the public broadcaster?

Based on its 88 per cent share of licence fee receipts in 2021, the sum that RTÉ would have received from the €3.67 million by which year-on-year licence revenue has dropped is about €3.2 million, roughly equivalent to the remuneration for six years of Tubridy’s combined television and radio services and also the total that RTÉ shelled out for its 10 highest paid presenters in the year 2019.

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So what else does €3.2 million get you at Montrose apart from six years of Tubs?

The evaporated income has, by now, overtaken both the €2.7 million that was spent on Toy Show: The Musical and the €2.5 million cost of “special events” at RTÉ in 2020. That year not being known for its bevy of special events, this price tag can be taken as a proxy for the cost to RTÉ of the last general election.

[ Podcast: Toy Show the Musical: How did RTÉ end up wasting €2.2 million on such a risky bet? ]

This makes the democracy set-piece ever so slightly cheaper than the ill-fated musical production, despite containing almost as many song-and-dance routines.

While a sum of €3.2 million is a droplet in the content ocean to the big global fish with which RTÉ must regularly compete, it represents a chunky enough plankton meal to RTÉ itself, either exceeding or nearing its annual spend on some genres.

The lost revenue, for instance, is close to RTÉ's 2021 arts budget of €3.4 million and is greater than the €2.7 million it spent on religious programming that year. Perhaps a prayer to the God of Licence Fee Compliance might now help?

If the trend continues, the amount by which television licence fee sales have declined could close in on the €5.2 million spent in 2021 on young people’s programming – a genre that saw its budget shrink substantially over the previous 15 years.

It may also overtake the money RTÉ raised in 2021 from circulation and event income (€3.6 million) and the cost to the organisation of energy, including network electricity, that year (€4.2 million). Speaking of electricity, €3.2 million is eight times the estimated full-year 2023 cost to RTÉ to operate its “energy intensive” longwave service. It ceased in April.

The vanished revenue also equates to about a third of the €10.2 million in operating costs for 2fm and more than half the €5.2 million required to run Lyric FM – a service that RTÉ's former management mooted shutting down in late 2019 at around the same time as it was preparing its fateful renegotiation of Tubridy’s pay.

It is still a mere fraction of the budgets for news, current affairs and weather budget (€66 million in 2021), sport (€49.3 million), factual programming (€42.6 million), entertainment (€26 million), overseas imports (€20.4 million) and drama (€20.9 million).

Ah, drama. The single largest item in the drama budget – tiny by the standards of international streaming giants – is in-house production Fair City. Based on cost estimates offered by RTÉ executives before the pandemic, €3.2 million would pay for about 50 episodes of the soap opera. That’s a lot of cliffhangers.

Now for a boring disclaimer: the genre and service budgets cited above are gross rather than net figures. They don’t reflect any advertising and sponsorship income that might be generated, making a need to balance the books a little more complicated than it appears based on overheads alone.

[ RTÉ pay scandal: We will all suffer in the long run from a stripped-back public broadcaster ]

And it’s not as if RTÉ can just slash and burn however it chooses to adjust to its new reality. Services that contribute comparatively low levels of commercial revenue – Lyric FM, for example – are almost bound to exist in the first place because they fulfil a key part of the broadcaster’s public service remit.

Any move to shut such services will almost certainly trigger a public and political backlash – as was the case almost four years ago when the axe hovered over Lyric FM.

The likelier outcome is that the Government – having rejected the Future of Media Commission’s recommendation that RTÉ be funded out of the exchequer rather than through a licence fee – will wind up directly contributing a greater share of its funds in the short term through the exchequer anyway to prevent it hitting the buffers.

At the same time, as new director general Kevin Bakhurst has indicated, investment decisions in upgrading RTÉ’s digital services and transforming the organisation may be delayed. In an industry frequently said to be fast-evolving, that’s not ideal.

With the Department of Arts and Media’s admitting that the fall-off in licence fee sales and renewals probably reflects “public sentiment following the revelations about certain payments by RTÉ”, the Taoiseach has been out urging people to continue paying the fee – unless they’re not liable, presumably – and gamely talking up the “real value” of public service broadcasting.

Indeed, although some Ministers might think otherwise, the Government has nothing to gain from cornering RTÉ into a financial abyss. The world being the swirl of misinformation and disinformation that it is, leaving a State-owned media organisation to fester in a well of reputational damage will ultimately cost more than money. Better to help it repair the damage from this corporate governance breakdown and move on.

Better, still, to avoid anything rash and expensive – like a snap general election. That one should be easy, right?