The RTE Authority will meet tomorrow to consider the television licence fee increase announced on Tuesday. The decision of the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms de Valera, approved by the Government, increases the licence fee by £14.50 to £84.50 from September 1st. RTE had sought an increase of £50, which would have brought the licence fee to £120.

The statement which Ms de Valera issued is the most overtly constructed criticism of RTE which I can recall in recent times. Essentially, she does not believe the figures put forward by RTE in support of the fee increase.

She has relied on the financial analysis provided to her by her consultants, PricewaterhouseCoopers. The text of her statement reads like a memorandum to Government and clearly the Government approved her proposals and her commentary on the RTE case.

We are, of course, in the dark about the nature and scope of the consultancy work carried out by PwC and to that extent this debate about the future funding of RTE is seriously at risk by a lack of transparency on the Minister's part in her refusal to disclose the nature of the advice given to her by PwC. She did, however, concede that the PwC report would be available to the RTE Authority for its meeting tomorrow.

How is it that the members of the authority - a board of public trustees for the national broadcaster, appointed by this Minister - could get the analysis and projections so wrong that she sought and took the advice of a consultancy service in preference to the board of RTE? How did such a situation come to pass that it has taken since October for the Government to resolve what the level of the licence fee should be?

The Minister has suggested that she does not believe that the RTE Authority can effectively monitor the spending on the quality of services provided by RTE. The Minister's statement is a most unusual and public rebuke of the RTE Authority.

Tomorrow the RTE Authority should resign en masse, so that a real debate about the future funding of RTE can take place. Furthermore, the Government of the day should be required to advertise the vacancies in the RTE Authority in a manner similar to the appointment of members of the Board of Governors of the BBC.

The Select Committee of Heritage and the Irish Language, which is the competent Oireachtas committee, should be given the mandate to describe how in the future the management and maintenance of public service broadcasting is carried on.

The Minister's recently enacted legislation, the Broadcasting Act 2001, is distinguished only by the centrality of powers bestowed by the Minister on herself. She alone appoints the RTE Authority and she alone considers the level of the licence fee. Indeed, she alone has the power and the gift of office to order the whole structure of digital broadcasting in the State.

If the Minister had a plan effectively to give the running of digital television broadcasting in the State to Sky, then she has succeeded. For the Sky digital subscribers in Ireland now stand at over 100,000. The licence fee has always been a problematic way to fund the Irish national broadcaster - the service which for the most part carries a central core of indigenous programming including news and current affairs and other programming genres central to the interests of the citizens of the State. The licence fee is a regressive tax and to that extent and in present circumstances is an unfair tax on those less well off with limited incomes.

Nonetheless, the licence fee was the brainchild of Sir John Reith and in this sense the idea of public service broadcasting rests on that income - a tax, paid by all the citizens, regardless of their income - so that the national broadcaster would be independent of the government of the day.

The extent to which RTE can be a member of the Fourth Estate depends very much on the security of its financing arrangements and these must be ordered in such a way as to make it independent of the government of the day. The manner in which the present Minister has ordained the future financing for RTE indicates that RTE is but a creature of Government policy.

RTE has been visited by various Government ministers with responsibilities for broadcasting. Mr Ray Burke tried to create a "level playing field", so that commercial radio and indeed commercial television would prosper, by intervening in the market place activities of RTE and capping its commercial income for that purpose.

Mr Michael D. Higgins established Teilifis na Gaeilge - now TG4 - with RTE monies and gave a sizeable portion of the RTE income to the independent television production sector with disastrous results to the workforce in RTE and a very poor return to RTE in terms of programme quality. Now Ms de Valera has issued, in her Broadcasting Act, a bill which can't be paid and decided that she won't pay it anyway.

Central to Ms de Valera's Broadcasting Act 2001 is the development of digital broadcasting. By her decision on Tuesday, she has, whether she knows it or not, decided that digital broadcasting and the information society of which she so fondly speaks is to be dominated by British digital broadcasting - or perhaps by the Irish Independent group which seems to be gearing up to take on a new role in Irish broadcasting.

Whatever the future for RTE, it is clear the national broadcaster no longer enjoys the confidence of the Government or of the Minister.

To deal with the present situation the RTE Authority should bring the whole matter before the citizens of the State in a most robust manner, which they are entitled to do under the terms of the Broadcasting Authority (Amendment) Act, 1976. Section 4 of that amended Act (the Conor Cruise O'Brien legislation) states, on the matter of objectivity and impartiality, that "in so far as the Act requires the Authority not to express its own views, it shall not apply to any broadcast in so far as that broadcast relates to any proposal, being a proposal concerning policy as regards broadcasting, which is of public controversy or the subject of current public debate and which is being considered by the Government or the Minister".

Muiris MacConghail teaches at the School of Media in the Dublin Institute of Technology