Sir, - Farrell Corcoran, former chairman of the RTE Authority (September 4th), offers the 1999 Broadcasting Bill's specific provisions as a definition of RTE's public service remit, presumably as justification for its receipt of the annual £70 million licence fee. The point is that RTE has no remit. By relying on the terms of proposed legislation which has not yet been passed into law, the former chairman is acknowledging this point since he will know that green papers and policy documents, whether European or national, have no effect in law.
But such a formulation, even if it were to be eventually passed into law, is manifestly inadequate due to the vagueness and imprecision of its content. If adopted, it would mean that all RTE's programming could be characterised as public service. By the failure to define and specify the services and programming RTE should provide to the public in return for the licence fee, RTE is in a position to compete unfairly with the independent broadcasting sector. Any attempt to introduce accountability whether to an independent body, Government or an Oireachtas Committee would be frustrated by the absence of specific verifiable criteria by which "the use it has made of licence fee" can be measured.
Grainne Henchy of RTE opines (August 25th) that "RTE's listeners and viewers can see and hear every day what. . .the licence fee is helping to pay for." But they do not know which programming has been paid for by the licence fee and which has not. Is this issue important? Yes; because each household paying its annual £70 licence fee tax would like to be assured that this money was being spent on distinctive programming which would not have been provided otherwise free of charge through market forces.
Farrell Corcoran would surely subscribe to the notion that at the heart of public service broadcasting some sort of market failure must be present. Otherwise, why would we not leave matters entirely to the private sector? Market intervention - e.g., through the use of the licence fee - is then appropriate in those areas where it has been identified that the market is failing to provide. But such intervention must be proportionate to the identified market failure since any further intervention will distort competition with the existing private sector and discourage new entrants.
Hence the need for a clearly defined public service remit which articulates what the market is failing to provide. It should then be possible to determine the cost of remedying such failure and avoid the current cash crisis enveloping RTE and its costs, described by Prof Corcoran's successor in the RTE chair as "out of control". - Yours, etc.,
Mark Deering, Director of Regulatory and Legal Affairs, TV3, Dublin 24.