Compulsory redundancies at TV3

TV3 HAS made 12 people compulsorily redundant, cut salaries and reduced its domestically produced programming in a move to trim costs.

The Irish terrestrial broadcaster, which is owned by private equity group Doughty Hanson, said staff would take a 7 per cent wage cut, with executive pay reduced by 15 per cent from April.

Its Sports Tonight programme, which was broadcast nightly from Monday to Thursday, has been dropped and did not air last night.

The programme’s main presenters, Trevor Welsh and Sinead Kissane, will remain with the station. None of the station’s higher profile presenters were among those who left the station yesterday.

Staff were informed of the cuts at the station’s Ballymount studios in southwest Dublin yesterday.

The move is the latest round of cost-cutting as TV3 reduces its costs in response to falling advertising revenues. Since last September the station’s workforce has fallen from 250 to 209.

TV3 said it hoped the changes would lead to annual savings of €2 million. This is in addition to €3 million in savings sought following an initial round of redundancies and other measures introduced last October.

David McRedmond, the station’s chief executive, said the company opted for compulsory redundancies “because the pool of people where we need to make cuts was too small for an effective voluntary redundancy programme”.

The same terms given to those who had left on a voluntary basis would be given to those made redundant yesterday, he said. This includes five weeks pay per year of service, notice pay and statutory entitlements.

While Mr McRedmond said the cuts were unfortunate and unavoidable given the business climate, he was cautiously optimistic about the coming year, noting there was “some evidence the advertising market has bottomed out and some advertisers are coming back”.

In revenue terms, Mr McRedmond said 2008 had been “in line” with the previous year, with the station generating around €62 million.

“We had a very strong first of the year [2008] followed by a very weak second half. The full impact of the recession hit around September,” he said. “While TV3 has been outperforming the TV ad market, we are not immune from the global downturn in advertising, which in Ireland has been exacerbated by the market failure from RTÉ’s dual-funding model.”