Poor old Raybo! As shafter-in-chief of RTÉ a decade ago, he became a hero of commercial media cheerleading for more commercial media, writes Eddie Holt.
Now, irony of ironies, many of those media outfits, which rejoiced when he shafted the State broadcaster by capping its advertising revenue, haven't a good word for their former hero. Some even want him jailed. There's thanks! Raybo, his erstwhile cheerleaders maintained, recognised and dutifully tackled the arrogance and complacency of cosseted RTÉ. Way to go, Ray! Media, like other industries, the cheerleaders argued, ought to be about value for money. Monopolistic RTÉ, with its hypocritical and high-minded guff about "public service", was hauling-in lucrative advertising that rightly belonged in the pockets of "bang for your buck" business types.
It's a sorry story, in which ironies enclose ironies. With its difficulties since compounded by increased competition and Síle de Valera, RTÉ has never recovered and probably never will.
Certainly, there was arrogance and complacency within the organisation and a review was due. But, face it, it was often arrogance and greed that motivated the predatory cheerleaders in their cosseted boardrooms.
Raybo's motivation was, we know, grubbily and greedily commercial too. The bungs tell their own story. As a Fianna Fáil hard-man however, there was also an ideological edge to his shafting of RTÉ. Repeated conflicts between FF and the State broadcaster have been well documented and clearly, Raybo decided payback - as well as pay-up - time had arrived.
Many among the cabal of influential, middle-class Stickies (Workers Party supporters) within RTÉ saw FF as their most formidable enemy - the Great Green Satan of Irish political life, which had even spawned the Provos. The FF-ers knew the WP view, of course, so the State broadcasting organisation was assailed from within and without.
So, politically hijacked within and politically distrusted without, RTÉ was always going to have problems. It became the prime site of a media civil war as conflicting ideologies fought for control.
In the long run, the propaganda of the "free market" (a clarion irony, since one of its defining tenets is that there's no such thing as a free lunch!) naturally won out as Irish politics was increasingly bought by big business and we lumbered on inexorably towards tribunal country.
Still, even more ironies abound. In shafting RTÉ, FF - the "republican party", remember - diverted loot not only to commercial media outfits in the Republic but in the North too. Unionist UTV, aware of its audience down here, was able to sell time to advertisers who might otherwise have bought slots on RTÉ. Very republican,Raybo! There's a post-colonial note to it all, of course, and it's not rude Brit-bashing to acknowledge it.
Ever since January 1926, when Douglas Hyde launched 2RN, the forerunner of Radio Éireann, Irish broadcasting has been a political minefield as powers in the fragile new State vied for influence. Early on, cultural revivalists and the Catholic Church dominated (even this week, letters to this newspaper debated the issue of broadcasting the Angelus) and, in time, politicians and activists of every hue followed suit.
When the Church (in the form of Cardinal D'Alton) and State (Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass) launched Irish State television on New Year's Eve, 1961, our rulers were as determined as ever to exert control. Dev believed, correctly, in spite of the fogeyish language, that the new medium could be used for "good or evil", even though his views on good and evil might not be shared by many viewers now.
In less than a decade, the North erupted and television played its part in fuelling nationalist grievances. Footage of black civil rights marchers in the United States provided a template for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
Celebrations on RTÉ of the 50th anniversary of Easter 1916 reignited republican sympathies and the channel's screening of RUC brutality in 1968 contributed significantly to the escalation of conflict.
As newspapers and magazines had fomented the Gaelic and Literary Revival, which culminated in bloody war, television, including RTÉ, fomented the Northern conflict. It would, of course, have erupted anyway, but TV largely determined its timing. The rights and wrongs of Section 31 are another day's consideration, but its very existence and implementation shows how politicians viewed the power of television.
In that, Irish broadcasting is a sordid story of post-colonial faction-fighting. FF took out its big stick, Raybo, to beat the Stickies within RTÉ and, ever mindful of commercial imperatives, he turned a personal profit as he did so.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of viewers paid their licence fees as the skirmishing raged, while established and wannabe moguls pumped out propaganda for commercial media. It wasn't difficult to persuade punters that RTÉ didn't deserve an increase in its licence fee.
Mind you, given the absurd sums it was paying some of its "stars", RTÉ didn't help either. Caught between a nominal public service ethos and an increasingly commercial one, the organisation never had a well-defined identity. Remember that Century Radio's start-up was primarily welcomed by some of the "stars" as an opportunity to extract even more loot for themselves.
Anyway, RTÉ has been castrated. No doubt, it needed pruning, but between post-colonial mess, Raybo's FF, Workers Party apparatchiks, the North's conflict, the propaganda of commercial opportunists and the hubris of some "stars", it got dismembered. Its own story would make a powerful TV drama.
It could, in fact, be a metaphor for the story of Ireland over the last 40 years. Of course, with RTÉ shafted, only the BBC or Channel 4 could dream of making it. The ironies deepen: in a country of renowned storytellers we can't even hope to screen the story of what ought to be our greatest storytelling outfit.When Raybo shafted, he shafted well.