RTÉ needs to recognise what it’s good at, and do more of it

The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” When it comes to a more local pond, there’s a distinct whiff in Dublin 4 these days – and I don’t mean the pongy breeze that wafts from the coast. That thing you smell is fear. Fear for the future, fear around job stability, fear about where on earth all this money that RTÉ needs to bung the levees before they break is going to come from.

But there’s a plan. A strategy. A New Direction. In this New Direction, RTÉ boss Kevin Bakhurst outlines his vision for the future of the organisation. Well, vision-ish. In the commitments, there are terms that will send shivers through any worker: “streamlined”, “reduced overheads” and, for those asleep at the back, “fewer employees”.

If we boil down the New Direction document to two main elements, it’s this: letting people go, and letting people in. The idea that 400 people can be cut from RTÉ – 150 of whom will be retiring over the next four years even though the notion that people who retire won’t have their roles replaced is both shocking and impractical – paints a grim picture for those in the organisation. Morale is sinking, 20,000 leagues and counting. The thing about RTÉ being the only game in town is that there is no other broadcaster in Ireland for hundreds of people to walk into. Some may go into the independent sector of course, but much like print journalism, when we talk about RTÉ job losses, what we’re really talking about is career loss.

As for those let in, that’s the independent sector. The workers in this sector generally work longer hours, have less security and are more efficient. They have to be. Nobody in the independent sector has the luxury of the kind of public funding RTÉ gets. And certainly, nobody in the independent sector has the luxury of knowing that one of the few routes to getting the boot from a gig is to find oneself as the public face of a national scandal.

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This week, I took the temperature from multiple people in the independent sector. There are primarily two reactions. Firstly, it’s good news. The independent television sector in Ireland should be larger, more stable, with more consistent – and just more – commissions. Expanding the industry and creating pathways for younger workers to grade up is positive. But the follow-up thought is this: how is RTÉ actually going to do this? Commissioning processes and practices will need to essentially be revolutionised in RTÉ.

Talk to anyone in the independent sector about commissioning practices in RTÉ and the same issues emerge over and over again; frustration with people in RTÉ who don’t make programmes dictating to those who do how they should be made, poor communication, a sort of conservative groupthink that stymies creative risk. There are plenty of bad experiences, and almost everyone in the independent sector has some brand of horror story. But there are also good experiences, processes that went smoothly, when everything was working relatively well and the thing got made. But if RTÉ is going to vastly increase commissioning, then they’re going to need a lot more people in charge of that in Montrose (and Cork).

This expansion may also require legislative change, given the €40 million figure cited in Section 116 of the Broadcasting Act 2009. Before the recession, RTÉ was spending a huge deal more than this. Since then, the overall commissioning budget for RTÉ programming from the independent sector has remained static, with tonnes of companies competing for the same pool of money. There are other moving parts in TV-land too. The prospect of a tax incentive for the unscripted sector is tantalising. RTÉ is not in control of that, but it should be advocating for it.

Will a new direction for RTÉ ensure the broadcaster’s long-term future?

Listen | 36:01

An Irish broadcaster that has to be many things to many people, with countless moving parts that often seem impossible to get moving smoothly, RTÉ's job is to make and facilitate programming that pulls in an audience, entertains, engages, reflects and interrogates Irish society and culture, our lives and aspirations and the things that are important to us. Nobody else can do what RTÉ does. That’s what it’s for. That’s what it’s meant to be. The worry is that as the organisation shrinks, so does its purpose. It can’t just survive. It has to thrive.

RTÉ needs to notice the parts of itself that already excel, and enhance them. It needs to turn internally as well as externally. Hell, it needs to go to therapy. Because if it fails, if it strips itself bare, it’s not just its employees who will suffer, it’s all of us. The depletion of a strong national broadcaster that maintains a public service broadcasting ethos as a core value is bad for democracy. Captain Kevin needs to start dreaming, start saving, and keep bailing – because it’s not necessarily the crew that’s the issue, it’s the organisational engine room.