PRESENT TENSE:Taxes, you will not be amazed to hear, are not popular. Politicians spend their careers promising to cut them. People spend their days whingeing about them.
When it comes to the television licence fee, some spend their lives dodging them. About 15 per cent of households don't have one, RTÉ recently complained. Although, given the attitude of the licence fee ads - condescending, scornful - even the most conscientious citizen must feel like rebelling.
However, it's how the broadcaster is spending the money that's most occupying the Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan. An agreement had been reached with the EU on how State television is funded, following a complaint from TV3, which argued that RTÉ was using licence fee revenue to snap up programming that wasn't part of its public service remit.
It has been claimed that Ryan warned RTÉ to stop "chasing ratings". In fact, he later said that he would be keeping an eye on the balance of programmes only during primetime, and deciding whether RTÉ was fulfilling its public service remit. Such issues will ultimately come under the supervision of a new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, to be set up as part of an impending Broadcasting Bill. But ultimately, according to reports, if the Minister feels RTÉ isn't living up to its end of the bargain, he can cut its funding.
Among the terms agreed with the EU is believed to be this rather problematic one: that licence-fee revenue should be used only for "public-service content", and that auctions for sports rights and imports be confined to advertising revenue.
An immediate problem is that more than half of RTÉ's revenue comes from advertising. Then comes the issue of deciding what constitutes public service.
According to RTÉ's current charter, sports programming must reflect "the demands for national, regional, minority, amateur and local sports today". Which seems clear enough, until you examine the Premier League and Champions League, in which Irish footballers feature for foreign teams, while Irish fans cheer them from stand and sofa.
Or, say, rugby's Heineken European Cup (currently broadcast by Sky Sports) which is an international competition, in which no Irish team is ever guaranteed to survive, yet is a central part of our sporting calendar. Should RTÉ bid for it? Or should this be left to TV3, which won the rights to last year's Rugby World Cup, but failed to match the excellence of RTÉ's rugby coverage, so proving that in this area, as in many others, RTÉ fulfils its mandate to "establish a benchmark of quality".
Regarding imports, why should it be considered part of RTÉ's public service function to buy, say, a work of genius such as The Sopranos and ensure it is aired promptly and in a decent slot? Is it really better that RTÉ replaces it with commissions it might not otherwise have considered worthy of broadcasting? And at what point should a minister decide that one station has too many desperate housewives? Meanwhile, the marketplace appears healthy enough, given that Channel 6 has The Wire, considered by some to be even greater than The Sopranos, and ratings winner Heroes. TV3, meanwhile, has some of the monsters of British light entertainment, even if they are simulcasts, although TV3 is this year making greater efforts at commissioning Irish programmes.
The problem for RTÉ is that its charter is so broad it could argue it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do: trying to keep everyone happy. That it's not always successful is a separate matter. The view in Brussels is that the charter is too vague, but Ryan in particular should be aware of the dangers of over-sharpening it. In 2003, during a Dáil debate on the previous broadcasting bill, he remarked: "I am slightly concerned that the State may be too prescriptive in trying to define good public broadcasting. It may adopt a conservative vision of the good programming that is required." He was talking specifically about a certain paragraph leaning towards dancing-at-the-crossroads-type programming, but the point still applies in broader terms.
In comments on the funding of RTÉ, Ryan complained that the Bill "almost gives the Minister direct control over the distribution of broadcasting funds. Regardless of the best intentions of the Minister, a highly dangerous precedent is being set because it will be possible for him, or a future minister, to direct broadcasting funds to particular areas." And here he is, in 2008, as the man holding the scissors over the same purse strings.
Back then, Ryan also made some very sensible suggestions about incorporating the television licence fee into general taxation instead of paying an actor to wag his finger at us every time we sit down to watch Fair City. It wasn't a bad idea, and is even better five years on, when people watch television online, on their iPods and their phones.
This debate, once again, is not about how the money is raised, but where it should be spent. The licence fee may not be popular, but there are few taxes people love talking about as much.
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