Laura Slattery: Why did RTÉ miss 17 of its audience performance targets last year?

“Commitment not achieved” is what I say to myself each evening as I review my to-do list and am forced to acknowledge that I have once again neglected to crack on with Middlemarch or fix the kitchen light that broke three years ago.

Coincidentally, the phrase pops up 17 times in RTÉ's newly-published 2022 annual report.

I’ve done a version of this paragraph before because, like RTÉ, I’m not averse to a repeat. This is not the first time that RTÉ has struggled to meet its own performance commitments. But it might well be the first time it has openly flunked so many of them.

Annual reports are corporate tick-box exercises and, as such, are often light on truth bombs. They can be fairly inane documents that – executive remuneration revelations aside – tell us what we already know.

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RTÉ's annual reports – with their blend of full-page celebrity photographs, charity appeal tallies and upfront waffle about “values” – appear to fit into this genre.

Certainly the 2022 edition, despite recording a €2.8 million deficit, seems to hail from a warmer parallel universe to the bleak one RTÉ now occupies, boasting as it does a surreal time capsule of a foreword by former director general Dee Forbes, seen smiling in a photograph taken right at the start of her ill-fated term.

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No wonder RTÉ chairwoman Siún Ní Raghallaigh saw fit to attach a statement explaining how the report – sent to Minister for Media Catherine Martin at the end of June – represents “a moment in time” for RTÉ and was “finalised” before the payments affair that broke the same month.

But it is not all glossy “crisis, what crisis” stuff. In blunt, dry language, the annual report outlines how RTÉ missed 17 of the performance commitments that have applied since 2018 as part of a statutory five-year review submitted to the media regulator and the Government.

These failures, which exceed the dozen racked up in 2021, are all outlined in a string of “commitment not achieved” admissions beginning on page 177.

They form a downbeat coda of underachievement, outnumbering the 10 occasions when RTÉ was able to declare “commitment achieved” and the six times it concluded the commitment had been “largely achieved”.

Another key flop was the target to ‘maintain public perception that RTÉ has high-quality content and services at greater than 75%’

The first undershot target – “maintain public perception that RTÉ is relevant to people in Ireland today at greater than 80 per cent” – feels like a biggie. RTÉ hasn’t met this threshold since the target was set in 2018.

It did come close that year, with 79 per cent of adults agreeing it was relevant. Not bad. But the percentage has been trending downwards ever since and in 2022 only 67 per cent agreed. That the target was evidently an over-ambitious one back in 2018 hardly bodes well for RTÉ's efforts to secure future buy-in from the public.

Another key flop was the target to “maintain public perception that RTÉ has high-quality content and services at greater than 75 per cent”. Positive perceptions have been on the slide here too. The 75 per cent figure has not been met in any of the last five years, with agreement dropping from 73 per cent in 2018 to 63 per cent last year.

This is as interesting as my own perception – as far as the quality of the RTÉ content and services I personally consume goes – is that 2022 was a much better year than 2018. “Quality” is never assessed in a vacuum, however, and the population likely has more points of comparison now.

RTÉ itself makes this argument in its “contextual commentary”, which highlights growth in subscriptions “to well-financed global streaming platforms” that have raised “audiences’ user-experience expectations”.

It doesn’t really get much better after this, in the sense that all of the unmet audience targets reflect problems that it may not be within RTÉ's power to fix merely by being better or even a little bit flusher.

Yes, the “largely achieved” commitment to “maintain average weekly reach for all RTÉ services at or above 90 per cent” for adults is not to be sniffed at and illustrates the continued importance of the public service broadcaster to Irish culture and the national discourse.

But RTÉ's inability to maintain average weekly reach at or above 90 per cent for 18-34s – this figure clocked in at 81 per cent – is unsurprising.

“In a highly competitive media environment, it is increasingly challenging to maintain near-universal reach for this age group,” it says in a note accompanying this missed performance commitment.

A target to grow average weekly reach via mobile and online to more than 56% was also too tough

Its sentence finishes “without the required investment injection a public funding settlement could provide”, but it probably shouldn’t. Budget injection or no budget injection, is RTÉ ever going to maintain “near-universal” reach for this age group ever again? Honestly, even that 81 per cent figure sounds good.

A target to grow average weekly reach via mobile and online to more than 56 per cent was also too tough. This metric slipped from 52 per cent in 2021 to 47 per cent last year, something of a disappointment even if other digital usage figures – such as the record high of 83.3 million RTÉ Player streams in 2022 – suggest “increased engagement”.

Other unachieved performance commitments relate to RTÉ's missions to “provide trusted, challenging and engaging content”, to “champion Irish culture” and to “celebrate diversity and cultivate Irish talent”. But it’s the last section in its dejected report card – its aim “to protect the future of public service media” – where the real trouble lies.

Tasked with maintaining the perception that it is valuable to Irish society at or above 85 per cent, RTÉ managed 77 per cent. It was also meant to maintain the perception that it is trustworthy at or above 75 per cent but had to make do with 69 per cent.

What seems much more likely to happen is the arrival of a more modest set of targets, more realistic for the media age we live in as well as a post-scandal RTÉ

Given this research is pre-Tubsgate, can anyone really envisage these percentages improving? What seems much more likely to happen is the arrival of a more modest set of targets, more realistic for the media age we live in as well as a post-scandal RTÉ.

“Context is key” when examining the RTÉ annual report, Ní Raghallaigh stresses in her disclaimer. But the RTÉ new broom’s attempts to repair the damage and secure the Government support it urgently needs is only part of that context.

Another part – the harsh realities of competing in a disparate, richly resourced and still-fragmenting media market – lies beyond the control of both.