This week, in his first interview since becoming Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Patrick O’Donovan shared his thoughts on the challenge facing RTÉ, chief among them the flight of younger viewers from linear TV.
“I don’t see that generation coming back, not unless there is a radical shift within what we deem to be public-service broadcast to actually bring them back,” he told the Irish Examiner, adding that “repeats of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Willy Wonka will not cut it”.
The new Minister’s analysis of the shift to streaming had something of the Trumpian weave about it. “They don’t call it the radio because they don’t know what a radio is and they certainly don’t listen to it,” he explained, as if describing the social habits of some faraway tribe. “They certainly would not be listening to Drone FM on a Saturday afternoon.”
These are the first insights we have been granted into the thinking of the man who is now responsible for the State’s cultural, media and communications policy. O’Donovan doesn’t have much of a record in these subjects. Apart from vociferous support for local sporting organisations, in the 14 years since he became a TD he has had nothing much to say about arts policy.
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His thoughts on the disruptions caused by digital communications, social media, artificial intelligence and big tech (all of which are now the responsibility of his department, following the addition of Communications to the brief) have been banal at best. He seems fond of taking a dig when the opportunity arises, but you would search in vain for an original idea or a concrete proposal.
Like most of his peers, he joined the condemnation of RTÉ during the scandals of 2023, suggesting the national broadcaster should sell off its Montrose campus. That was a reasonable suggestion put forward by a number of commentators at the time. But, as with many of his recorded comments, it had an off-the-top-of-the-head quality, with no apparent follow-up. (RTÉ‘s director general, Kevin Bakhurst, has since indicated that selling Montrose is not a workable financial proposition, so let’s see if O’Donovan raises it again now he is the Minister.)
You won’t get any of them to admit it, but there will have been glum faces among those who run the State’s culture industries when O’Donovan’s name was pulled out of Micheál Martin’s hat nine days ago. They would have been hoping for O’Donovan’s party colleague Hildegarde Naughton, who has at least been known to darken the doors of a theatre occasionally, or Niamh Smyth of Fianna Fáil, who served as her party’s arts spokeswoman and ably chaired the Oireachtas media committee during RTÉ’s Ryan Tubridy meltdown.
What do you want from a minister for culture? At best, a committed advocate with a clear vision and a strong voice at cabinet. Too often in the three decades since it became a senior ministry, the post has been an afterthought bestowed on the last name on the list of those who must be rewarded with a job. Some of those appointees turned out to be better than others. Too often, though, they clearly didn’t have enough political clout when it came to budget negotiations. That was a contributory factor in the yawning gap that emerged for several years during the economic recovery between the rhetoric and the reality of successive governments’ arts policies.
O’Donovan’s predessor Catherine Martin, as deputy leader of her party, and with a background in arts and education, delivered the biggest step change in decades. She also became embroiled in a controversy not of her making over governance at RTÉ, which she didn’t handle particularly well, and reluctantly agreed to an unsatisfactory political fudge over funding public-service media.
O’Donovan inherits two particularly pressing questions from her. The first is what to do about the Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme, which is due to wind down at the end of this year. Pressed on this during the election campaign, both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael committed to continuing and extending the scheme, yet the Programme for Government is equivocal on the matter.
The other is the proposed content levy on streaming platforms and pay-TV services to create a new fund for Ireland’s audiovisual industry. Curiously, O’Donovan told the Examiner that he “does not see an appetite” at EU level to tackle the problems of public-service media. While reading himself into his brief, he should really acquaint himself with the provisions of the European Union’s audiovisual media services directive, which for several years has allowed member states to implement such a levy – something that has been done by France, Germany and Spain, and that was high on the agenda of the last government.
