PEOPLE CAUGHT without a television licence will be able to pay a fixed penalty rather than face a court prosecution, under changes to be announced today by Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Eamon Ryan.
The measures, included in the Broadcasting Bill to be published next month, will mean offenders will have the choice of buying a €160 licence and paying a €53 fine.
However, offenders will face a court appearance and a fine of €634.87 for a first offence and €1,267.74 for subsequent offences if they fail to pay up within three weeks. The change, which means offenders can avoid the embarrassing publicity surrounding a court case, is “a proportionate way of encouraging compliance, reducing the cost of prosecutions and lessening the workload of the courts in respect of television licence prosecutions”, Government sources said last night.
Currently, An Post, which collects TV licence revenue on behalf of RTÉ, may only issue a fixed payment notice to a homeowner after it has sent two reminder letters 56 days apart. The new system will be unveiled today by Mr Ryan, as he officially launches the recently-opened television licence online service, which accepts payments by credit and debit cards – similar to the one that is already operating for motor taxation.
The Bill will also grant Ministers powers to create a new “commercial licence” for hotels and other premises with large numbers of televisions, as is already the case in other European countries.
Over 10,000 prosecutions were taken by An Post in 2005 against TV licence offenders, and it began to target those with unlicensed TVs in holiday homes in the last year. Since 2003, 167 people have been jailed for non-payment of the television licence fee after they refused or were unable to pay it.
The Irish Prison Service says that it costs up to €90,000 a year to keep a prisoner in jail.
Prosecutions are launched by An Post “only as a last resort”, it says, and only after offenders receive two reminders and a visit by an inspector to their home, where a final warning is issued if the homeowner has not heeded earlier notices.
The Department of Justice promised in 2007 to produce a new Bill that would see those who refused to pay fines sentenced to community service, or to have their wages or social welfare payments docked to pay the fine.
University College Dublin’s Institute of Criminology has found that up to 1,800 people a year go to jail for non-payment of a variety of different fines, and that repeat offending rates are as high as 85 per cent.