I was going to write that the Government’s “plan” for RTÉ is a dog’s dinner, but the Irish Times lawyers warned that this would risk multiple actions for defamation from Pedigree Chum, Good Boy, Royal Canin, Winalot and every other purveyor of canine treats. They would rightly be offended by any comparison of their fine products to what Catherine Martin, with the faraway stare and nervous demeanour of a hostage in a ransom video, unveiled last week.
To understand what the Government has just done with RTÉ, we must recall a concept introduced by Brendan Behan in his great memoir of incarceration, Borstal Boy: sea-pie. The young prisoner is learning the ropes of the British detention system’s dietary regime. A more experienced boy explains to him that he should look forward to sea-pie. What’s that, he asks? “You’ll see it often ... Sea-pie today, see fugh-all tomorrow.”
Last week, the Government announced its intended funding of the national broadcaster: €225 million next year, €240 million in 2026, and €260 million in 2027. This is a feast of sea-pie. It amounts to “fugh-all tomorrow”.
These figures have no basis in legislation and are not linked to any specific plans for what RTÉ will actually broadcast over those years. They can be changed at any time by whoever is in office. And they leave intact all the absurdities and contradictions that have thrown the future of public-service broadcasting into grave doubt.
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Everyone knows that the idea of funding the public broadcaster by trying to get people to pay a licence for a device (a TV set) that increasing numbers of them do not have is plain silly. Everyone in this case includes the Commission on the Future of Media established by the Government itself, the relevant minister (Martin) and her civil servants, and most comparable European democracies.
What this dereliction of governmental duty means is, in effect, the gradual privatisation of RTÉ
Conversely, no one in Government has articulated even a semi-coherent case for keeping the licence fee. But so what? We’re sticking with a familiar futility.
And everyone also knows that RTÉ's hybrid model of public and private funding (through commercial advertising) has completely distorted its values and priorities. The public ends up paying for a broadcaster whose driving imperative is to deliver their eyeballs to advertisers. But we’re sticking with this structural dysfunction too.
What this dereliction of governmental duty means is, in effect, the gradual privatisation of RTÉ. The station as we know it is being dismantled and its public functions outsourced to private companies.
As it happens, we got a glimpse of this future at more or less the same time as the Government’s funding announcement. The station’s big offering last week was the documentary, Bishop Casey’s Buried Secrets. It was, as we were told on air over and over again, “produced by RTÉ in association with the Irish Mail on Sunday”.
It is no criticism of the work of the Mail’s excellent reporter Anne Sheridan to say that this is a harbinger of what’s coming. Documentaries like this are a vital part of what defines public-service broadcasting. They deal with difficult and dark subjects and they put RTÉ's reputation on the line.
When they go right, as with Mary Raftery’s searing explorations of child abuse in Church-run institutions and parishes (including States of Fear in 1999 and Cardinal Secrets in 2002) they provide the most potent vindication of public broadcasting. When they go wrong, as in the false accusations in Mission to Prey in 2011, they inflict terrible damage, not just on individuals, but on trust in RTÉ itself.
Yet with the relentless branding of Bishop Casey’s Buried Secrets we were being softened up for the idea that even this most sensitive content should be delivered “in association with” a private and foreign media entity – in this case an English newspaper group that specialises in scare stories and right-wing propaganda. (It was the Mail, for example, that, in a banner front-page headline, branded judges who had ruled that the UK parliament had a right to vote on the initiation of the Brexit process, as ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE).
This literal hollowing-out of RTÉ is to be accompanied by the outsourcing of the programmes viewers most associate with the station
This softening up is preparing the public for the gradual disappearance of RTÉ as a physical and creative entity. It is very clear from the plans outlined by its director general Kevin Bakhurst that the station will produce less and less of its own work and become, essentially, a mere platform for the work of private producers.
Bakhurst’s plan is to depopulate Montrose and sell off most of its buildings and studios. This is justified on the very dubious grounds that those buildings are obsolete and would cost €300 million to refurbish – a figure for which no real evidence has been tendered. (The State recently carried out a radical refurbishment of Tom Johnson House, just down the road from RTÉ, for around €20 million. It has a bigger footprint than all the main Montrose buildings combined.)
This literal hollowing-out of RTÉ is to be accompanied by the outsourcing of the programmes viewers most associate with the station. It is already clear that both the Late Late Show and Fair City are to meet this fate. At a recent Oireachtas committee hearing, Bakhurst wriggled away from the word “privatisation”, but substituted his own formula: RTÉ “would be commissioning it from the independent sector, which we do with the vast majority of our TV programmes already”.
Startlingly, the people who currently produce these shows will be expected to dig their own graves by training private company employees to replace them. Niamh O’Connor, Bakhurst’s deputy, told the Oireachtas committee: “We would see some of our teams in RTÉ working in a hybrid model with the independent sector, because they have the skill set that may not be there yet. It would take time for them to work with the staff of the production companies involved to bring their skill set along.”
No one in the Government has put forward any justification for hollowing out RTÉ. But, in an age when trusted information has never been more vital to the defence of democracy, that is what it is doing.