ANDREW McGRATH,
Sir, - RTÉ's argument for a further licence fee increase may have impressed those already moved by its manifest commitment to upholding Ireland's cultural identity, even if it be with its last financial breath.
However, RTÉ's unprecedented decline in income for 2001 cannot be blamed on a drop in advertising revenue or on spiralling operating costs, both of which have been increasing, since 1996 at least, in step with expenditure. The increase in expenditure last year, however, exceeded the operating costs of the station by some €36.2 million. The reason for RTÉ's thus breaking into its emergency savings is none too clear.
It is interesting in this light that it should pass around its begging bowl at the Forum on Broadcasting, professing commitment to all things Irish just insofar as its European masters do not take offence - a danger one would have thought little enough in evidence in recent years.
Given the dangers posed by government intervention to the independence, transparency and accountability for which it is renowned, it might be thought that RTÉ would soon decrease the vast salaries paid to some of its high-profile personnel to meet its projected €29 million deficit for this year.
The question that arises is whether what is being upheld is not so much independence from State interference as freedom to act as a state in microcosm, with no accountability either for its mismanagement or its cultivation of the mediocre. - Yours, etc.,
ANDREW McGRATH, Glenmore Road, Dublin 7.