Hugh Linehan: Welcome to season 15 of RTÉ’s Let’s Not Make a Decision

Most of us have done it. A moment comes when, like Peter Finch in Network, we’re mad as hell and not going to take it any more. By the time the red mist lifts we have sent an email to somebody or other, telling them what we really think of them and their behaviour.

This rarely turns out well. So when in July of this year, chairwoman of the RTÉ Authority Moya Doherty accused Taoiseach Micheál Martin of a “deliberate undermining of what RTÉ is here to do”, as reported by The Irish Times this week, readers might have assumed this represented some sort of rush of blood to the head. For the most senior figure in a semi-State body to make such an accusation against the government of the day is the equivalent of you or me sending a mail littered with the sort of words that tend to get asterisked out on these pages.

In fact, it was an entirely accurate description of what Martin’s government, along with those led by his predecessors Leo Varadkar, Enda Kenny and Brian Cowen, have been up to for an extraordinarily long time.

If the State’s ruminations over the future of broadcasting were a TV series, it would have jumped the shark a very long time ago

The mail formed part of correspondence over the report of the Future of Media Commission, established in September 2020 to investigate and make recommendations on the existential challenges faced by Irish media. The commission delivered its final report last autumn, whereupon the Government sat on it for 10 months before finally publishing it in July.

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If the State’s ruminations over the future of broadcasting were a TV series, it would have jumped the shark a very long time ago. In the meantime, our viewing habits, the advertising market and the technology we use have all been utterly transformed. There are people in university now who hadn’t started junior infants when in early 2008, PwC were awarded a tender by then minister Eamon Ryan’s Department of Communications “to assist in the re-engineering of the current annual review and related adjustment to the television licence fee process”. Since then we’ve had 14 years of investigations, reports, strategic evaluations, working groups, commissions, pauses for reflection, unexpected delays and all the other paraphernalia of prevarication and obfuscation which the State’s apparatus deploys when faced with a choice it really, really doesn’t want to make.

You don’t have to wade through the forests of verbiage generated down the years to know the choice itself is pretty clear. Unless you advocate the abolition of public service broadcasting (a perfectly legitimate opinion, but not one held by any of the country’s main political parties), you can do one of three things: retain the current system, with some marginal reforms; replace the licence fee with a public-service charge decoupled from ownership of a TV set; or fund broadcasting from general taxation like any other public service. The worst of these three options is retaining the current costly, inefficient and archaic licence fee, but that is effectively what has been done for the past decade and a half and seems set to continue. Among other things, that makes it impossible to implement the structural reforms which broadcasting in Ireland so badly needs.

Politically toxic

For a long time it looked as though, if change was ever to come, it would be in the form of a broadcast charge, with Ryan’s successor, Pat Rabbitte, promising one would be introduced in 2013. That plan was torpedoed by the water charges fiasco, which rendered the words “household charge” politically toxic for a long time.

Even so, this still seemed the most likely route for reform, until the commission’s report was published this year. To some surprise, it recommended moving to a directly funded model. That has been rejected by the Government. There are certainly legitimate concerns about what direct funding would mean for broadcasters’ independence, but the routcome is that we are back, yet again, to square one. Welcome to Season 15.

Sometimes you have to call things as you see them. Doherty, whose term as chairwoman ends soon, was right to do so

It is hard to disagree with Doherty when she writes in her mail to Martin: “It seems that the outcome of this lengthy process is that once again meaningful reforms of the funding system that underpins public media in Ireland will be avoided by Government. Accepting 49 of the 50 recommendations in the report as indicated by the department, but without any commitment to reform the licence fee or any firm commitment to interim funding for RTÉ or the wider media sector renders this whole process meaningless.”

Sometimes you have to call things as you see them. Doherty, whose term as chairwoman ends soon, was right to do so. And no amount of pious waffle from Government about its commitment to public-service broadcasting can gainsay the evidence of our own eyes.