Last week, RTÉ’s senior executives appeared yet again before the Public Accounts Committee. TDs once again pored over the small stuff – travel costs, staff allowances, line items in briefing documents – and ignored the only question that actually matters.
What does the Government want RTÉ to be?
The State is RTÉ’s main shareholder, yet for nearly two decades it has refused to address the issue at the heart of the current crisis.
The TV licence has been frozen at €160 since 2008, for 18 years. In the same period, the price of a stamp, set by another State-owned company, An Post, facing its own declining market, has more than tripled. The licence fee, meanwhile, has not risen by a cent, even as Ireland’s population has grown substantially, the cost of producing content has risen and the media landscape has been turned inside out. The licence fee looks increasingly archaic in this world of streaming.
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No commercial enterprise anywhere on earth could absorb an 18-year price freeze on its primary revenue stream while its costs keep climbing. Yet successive governments have expected this of the national broadcaster, all the while criticising it for its failure to thrive.
And not for want of advice. Former Minister for the Arts Catherine Martin established the Future of Media Commission, which reported in 2022 and made a recommendation to abolish the broken licence fee and fund public service media directly from the exchequer. The Government accepted virtually every recommendation in that report except for the one that actually mattered. The central finding of its own expert commission was simply set aside.
What we are left with is – instead of a decision – a series of fudges. The three-year, €725 million package agreed in 2024 was sold as certainty despite being nothing of the sort. It was a hybrid model that retained the licence fee (which everyone privately admits is broken), topped up with exchequer funding agreed grudgingly, year by year, and expiring in 2027.
Licence-fee sales have collapsed by almost 250,000 since 2019 and continue to fall. Every government has inherited exactly the same problem, only worse.
Even the Government cannot seem to come to a coherent position on the issue: Martin wanted to replace the licence fee with direct state subvention; Tánaiste Simon Harris promised “finality” in 2024; Taoiseach Micheál Martin and two previous finance ministers subsequently made it known they were against replacing the licence fee; and the current Minister for the Arts Patrick O’Donovan said he has “no notion” of abolishing it or introducing a Netflix levy and “we won’t be giving [RTÉ] any more exchequer funding” either.
The irony is that money is not the issue. Ireland has plenty of money collected from the very companies that have disrupted and threatened the business models of our traditional media ecosystem. Google, Meta, Apple and others have made Dublin their European home and their corporation tax receipts have transformed the public finances. Meanwhile, these platforms compete with RTÉ for audiences and advertising with no public service obligations. A small portion of these profits could help ensure we have a State broadcaster committed to telling Irish stories for Irish people.
Instead of coming up with a plan, our politicians prefer to sit on Oireachtas committees indulging in performative outrage over expenses claims and hotel bills. Yes, RTÉ’s governance failures were real and accountability was warranted. But almost every organisation of scale – public or private – has governance lapses, and since summer 2023 RTÉ has since been subjected to more scrutiny, reform and oversight than almost any institution in the State. We are now several years on and at this stage we need to think bigger than a few pairs of flip-flops.
The committee hearings have become theatre – a means for politicians to look tough on RTÉ while deflecting from their own inadequacy. It is far easier to quiz the director general about the cost of a taxi or a camera crew in Czechia than to answer the question only they can answer: what is RTÉ for and how much are we willing to pay for it?
That question has only two possible answers.
The first is a decision to fund RTÉ properly and over the long-term via a stable, index-linked, multiannual funding model that will give it the certainty it needs to deliver a modern public service mandate at scale.
The second is to decide, openly, that what they want is a much smaller national broadcaster and to own the consequences of that. These would inevitably include large-scale compulsory redundancies, a dramatically-reduced output, fewer journalists to hold the Government to account and a diminished public service footprint. It would mean our cultural content being commissioned in London or Los Angeles. That would be a legitimate choice, however much I would personally disagree with it.
What is not legitimate is the current approach: refusing to make any choice at all and instead slowly starving the organisation. And then blaming the resulting decline on it.
If we choose to hand our media production entirely over to commercial forces then we know exactly what the result will be: we only need to look across the Atlantic to see. We’ll be left with a fragmented and polarised environment where news is entertainment and public trust in media has evaporated.
RTÉ, for all its well-documented flaws, remains one of the few institutions capable of convening the country around a common conversation. It covers the courts, local government, the Gaeltacht and the arts. It peers into corners of Irish life no algorithm would ever prioritise. It produces the most listened-to radio programmes in the country, the most-watched television, award-winning podcasts and a news site that is one of Ireland’s most visited. The audience is still there. It’s true that RTÉ must do far more to reach younger audiences, but that transformation requires investment – and investment requires a commitment to future funding. RTÉ won’t win the TikTok generation with funding stuck at 2008 levels.
RTÉ is either worth paying for or it is not. But that decision belongs to the Government, RTÉ’s shareholder-in-chief, not to another technical working group, another expert report or another round of Oireachtas grilling. Eighteen years of sitting on the fence is enough.
Daire Hickey is managing partner of 150Bond and a former board member of RTÉ
