Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ must change or die

­When the scandal over its hidden payments first broke, Minister for Media Catherine Martin said that RTÉ is in “nearly an existential crisis”. To which one can only say: bring it on.

An existential crisis is one in which an institution’s current mode of existence has become impossible. It must either change or die. In the case of RTÉ the forcing of this choice is long overdue.

The scandal brings to a head a fundamental problem that, in the usual Irish fashion, has been allowed to fester for decades. That problem is simply stated: the corruption of public broadcasting by commercial interests.

Because of the way it was set up, RTÉ has to function simultaneously as a public service vital to the democratic life of the Republic and as a subsidiary of the advertising and marketing industries whose sole concern is to sell products and promote brands.

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This split personality means that it has to treat us – the public in public service broadcasting – as both citizens to be informed and engaged and as consumers to be delivered to businesses. The contradiction can no longer be ignored. When two masters are being served, it is the citizens who get the leftovers.

The problem, moreover, is not just that we sell the integrity of our public service broadcasting to commercial interests, it’s that we sell it very cheap. The commercial revenue raised by RTÉ is a relative pittance: €150 million a year.

And, from the point of view of citizens, it’s terrible value for money. In return for those small potatoes, our public media is stuffed with junk food.

RTÉ gets the majority of its income – 57 per cent – from public funding. But the need to chase the other 43 per cent defines the whole nature of the institution. In spite of the excellence and public spiritedness of most of the people who work in it, it is chained to the values of the marketplace.

We have reached the ultimate point in that subversion when an institution whose whole reason for existence is the upholding of truth ends up systematically lying to citizens and the State. That is – and should be – a life-threatening condition.

If there’s one positive to be taken from the current debacle, it is that, with very few exceptions, politicians from all parties in the Dáil have prefaced their justified criticisms of RTÉ management by stressing the democratic necessity for public service broadcasting. There is, at least in principle, a cross-party recognition that the need for it is, in the era of mass disinformation, greater than it has ever been.

So let’s go back to basics and ask whether, given that need, anyone would devise the current set-up as a rational way to satisfy it. Of course they wouldn’t.

Most European countries now put public money into their national broadcasters through the taxation system. They do this because it’s fairer (taxes are progressive, licence fees are not), more efficient and more stable.

Conversely, there are only four other countries in the European Broadcasting Union – France, Poland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania – that persist with the wildly anachronistic idea of charging a flat fee based on the ownership of a physical TV set. This is the equivalent of trying to fund mobile phone services by charging for a licence on landlines.

Direct public funding of RTÉ is not a new or radical idea. It has already been happening by stealth.

[ Michael McDowell: Inefficient, expensive, exasperating TV licence regime needs overhaul ]

It’s easy to forget that the Exchequer puts a lot of taxpayers’ money directly into RTÉ because it buys TV licences for people who get the Household Benefits Package and for people over 70. Since the population is ageing, these payments have been rising as a proportion of the overall funding of public service broadcasting.

So, what’s been happening in recent years, without anyone explicitly planning for it, is a steady shift of public funding from individual licence fee payers to the Government. In 2010, the Exchequer contributed 37 per cent of public funding for broadcasting. In 2020, it paid 43 per cent.

Demographics mean that this upward trend is set to continue. But it’s a drift, not a policy.

Meanwhile, the number of households and businesses paying directly for a TV licence declines steadily year on year. Everybody knows that evasion is widespread: official figures show that a mere 10,000 businesses pay for a TV licence in any given year.

The known rate of evasion in Ireland (at 15 per cent) is more than twice that of the UK and seven times the rate in Germany.

And it will keep getting worse. For the fewer people pay their TV licence, the more unfairly the burden falls on those who do. Again, as so often in Ireland, the good citizens who comply with the law are increasingly made to feel like fools.

There needs to be a mercy killing that puts this absurd system out of its misery. Think of it as a share buyback scheme.

For an extra €150 million a year, we can buy back our broadcaster from commercial interests and make it what it always should have been: an ad-free public service. No advertising department; no barter accounts; no super-agents; no side deals; no brand ambassadors; no corporate entertainment packages; no “consultancy fees” and above all no justification for paying vast salaries to a small elite of star presenters. All that wasted money can go into programming.

RTÉ giving up advertising revenue might be a bonanza for the commercial sector. But it is not hard to devise a way to recoup some of that windfall for a greatly expanded fund for high-quality independent productions. The whole media sector in Ireland could be invigorated.

The cliche is that you should never waste a good crisis. But RTÉ has for years been a slow-moving wasted crisis. Like much of its output, its state of emergency has been a boring repeat.

Now, it has finally grabbed the sustained attention of the political system. It shouldn’t take a freak show to get the Government and the Oireachtas fully switched on and glued to their seats, but that’s currently what’s on all channels.

Seize the day before the political class loses interest and reaches for the remote. Ireland needs and can well afford a fully public broadcaster that is not constantly trying to flog us stuff and is therefore not selling out the integrity of most of the people who work for it.

Catherine Martin has been a quietly revolutionary Minister for the Arts, the best we’ve had since Michael D Higgins a quarter of a century ago. Stupid and enraging circumstances have given her the chance to push through the most radical reform in the history of Irish broadcasting. She is in the director’s chair and should call first “Cut!” and then “Action!”