OPINION/Breda O'BrienRTÉ bashing is cheap and easy. RTÉ does much excellent work which is taken for granted. Like many people, I have a kind of love/hate, or perhaps affection/frustration relationship with the place. I grew up with it. Sunday evenings were spent watching The Riordans, and after almost every episode my mother would announce: "Nothing much happened. Again."
Christmas came early this year for RTÉ, although they might regard it more as a reward for all the times they received a lump of coal in their stocking. Bob Collins, RTÉ's director general, confessed himself relieved and delighted at the announcement by Minister Dermot Ahern that they are finally going to get a realistic licence fee increase.
Whether the rest of us will be relieved and delighted at the direction which RTÉ will now take, remains to be seen.
She did not sound too displeased, and perhaps that was because nothing much happened on a regular basis in the Ireland of the time. A much more frenetic Ireland has replaced the Ireland of The Riordans, and RTÉ has found the change as hard as any other hierarchical institution. I worked for a year in RTÉ during the 1990s and it was quite a demoralised and defensive place then, but became even more so. There are many, many decent and hardworking people in RTÉ, who have to grin and bear it as they cope with the public's complaints while at the same time working with decreasing resources and increasing management demands. However, there is also an institutional mindset, and an alarming similarity of political and cultural outlook. It drives friends within RTÉ crazy when I say this, as they point to the people from all around the country who work there. It's not where people are from, I usually respond, it's that Montrose state of mind.
Lots of viewers and listeners feel alienated from that mentality, and deeply frustrated by their inability to influence or change it in any way.
Ironically, some of the most alienated are those who would like to have a loyalty to a national broadcaster, because they are people who hate the empty blandness which now passes for global culture.
They want a strong culture of public service broadcasting, of robust but fair debate on contentious issues, of reflection on where we are going as a society. Time after time they are disappointed. Let me give but one small example. I wrote a column last week on RTÉs ban on an Irish Catholic advertisement. The column generated a large response in terms of letters, e-mails and phone calls. It was what the great left-wing educationalist Paolo Freire would have called a "generative theme". In other words it evoked emotion and response. It seemed an obvious question for Questions and Answers - Was RTÉ right to ban the Irish Catholic ad.? But no, it didn't appear, and the silence from other flagship programmes was equally deafening. RTÉs discomfort with religion is part of a general discomfort with parts of Irish culture which it seems to find regressive and embarrassing, which are a normal and accepted part of life outside Montrose. This out of touch quality has led many people to turn instead to local radio.
Minister Ahern also announced two other measures which have significant implications. One was the setting up of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) which will amalgamate the functions of the RTÉ Authority and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI). He also announced the ring-fencing of part of the licence fee, to be used for "innovative programming", primarily in the independent broadcast sector. He was effusive in his praise of local broadcasters, whom, he claims, often produce public sector broadcasting the equal of anything which RTÉ produces.
I could not help wondering what the Kilkenny Community Communications Co-Operative Society who own Radio Kilkenny made of that praise, and whether it made them gag. After 12 years of successful operation where all profits were ploughed back into the radio station, and four out of five local people listened on a weekly basis, they have had their licence taken away by the BCI - just like that. There is no appeals mechanism. The successful consortium who gained the licence has members who also have interests in Newstalk 106, and 98FM.
Media interests are increasingly being concentrated in the hands of the few. Independent News and Media already had significant local newspaper holdings and is now venturing into broadcasting. Scottish Radio Holdings owns five local newspaper titles and Today FM. Radio Kilkenny was the last genuinely community-owned commercial radio licence in Ireland.
The shareholders are the ordinary people, voluntary organisations and churches of the area. The new licence holders boast that they will be "local without being parochial". This is something to be proud of only if parochial is automatically a pejorative term. Radio Kilkenny was parochial in the positive sense of that word. It echoed the heartbeat of a community without having to strain to do so.
If this process of increasing emphasis on commercialism and profit continues in local radio, there is a great danger that listeners will be alienated from that, too.
So we potentially could have a situation where people do not identify with the urban emphasis of RTÉ and are not well-served by independent broadcasting, either. Two thousand people attended a protest meeting about the loss of the Radio Kilkenny licence. In these days of political apathy, that is extraordinary. But who is listening to the listeners? Reform might start with an appeals mechanism for decisions like the one about Radio Kilkenny.
Another worrying aspect is that there is no proposal to beef up the currently toothless Broadcasting Complaints Commission. When did we last hear about a serious censure for any broadcaster because of bias, or lack of balance, or giving space to the extremists on an issue rather than more representative voices? Frankly, RTÉ's proposed Audience Council is not enough.
Broadcasters can meet programme targets for certain types of broadcasting, but how do you deal with more subtle problems? It will take more than an Audience Council to deal with the bias which creeps in when everyone shares the same mindset on key issues, a mindset which is erroneously termed liberal, but has nothing to do with the values of tolerance and diversity.