THE LICENCE fee was not being spent by RTÉ in a way that benefited creative artists, the entertainment lawyer James Hickey said at the Burren Law School at the weekend.
Mr Hickey, a partner in the firm, Matheson Ormsby Prentice, said the €160 licence fee was the biggest single subsidy for creative production or for work not funded by the marketplace.
It amounted to almost €200 million annually yet independent indigenous television production, the amount contracted out to independent producers, was at €70 million.
“It is proposed to be reduced to €55 million. That is less than 20 per cent of the overall expenditure of RTÉ.
“RTÉ had too many managers and not enough creative artists,” he said. “There were 2,300 people working in RTÉ but only 38 television producers. It speaks for itself in terms of the focus on what they do.
“The problem I think we have to address is that RTÉ in structural terms is not spending the licence fee it has in a way which benefits creative artists,” he said.
Mr Hickey is the only Irish lawyer in the world’s top 25 entertainment lawyers, according to Euromoney’s Expert Guide to the World’s Leading Lawyers’ directory.
Addressing the annual school in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, on the theme of Arts and the Law, he said RTÉ was, like the HSE, an example of an organisation which had developed over the years in Ireland. It had 363 managers, or one manager for every six persons employed.
“So I think what we need to do is look again at the statistics in RTÉ in terms of making sure there is an opportunity for the creativity that exists in Ireland to be brought to the fore and for that particular subsidy to be properly looked at in terms of whether it is properly being spent on the work of creating wonderful television and radio programmes for the Irish public or is too much of it going into administration.”
He said the broadcasting Bill, currently before the Dáil, was already outdated, and did not advance the cause of indigenous television production to the extent it could have.
“As a nation we have yet to focus fully on and harness that creativity comprising the cultural industries so that jobs and wealth and exports can be created.”
He agreed with artist Robert Ballagh, who also addressed the school, that not enough emphasis was being placed on the importance of copyright law.
He said that in the area of copyright or royalties, visual artists had always been in the back of the queue. He was critical of the resale rights scheme, introduced in June 2006, which enables artists to benefit from the resale of their works.
Ballagh said it was mean spirited of the Government to have availed of a two-year EU derogation to exclude the estates of artists from benefiting from the resale rights.
“What that means is that widows of artists and widowers of artists are excluded from benefiting from this resale right.
“We would like the Irish Government to be far more responsive and far more appreciative of the plight of the artist in this country and to deal with issues like this in an imaginative and supportive way so that the artist in our society has something to fall back on.”
Garry Hynes, artistic director of the Druid Theatre, said she had looked with dismay at an official understanding of the arts as a structure or function “or something you can organise”.
“Creativity is something you can actually provoke to happen. You know there are certain circumstances that can help it happen but it is something you cannot control.”
She said that new arts centres and theatres had been built around the country but now many do not have enough material to be performed in them.