Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The writing is on the wall for TV licence. That is the reality of what is happening outside this House. Hundreds of thousands of people are voting with their wallets and are boycotting the TV licence fee. As a consequence of that act, there seems to be a very significant debate in government about what is to come next. That is really what we should be focused on today. We should have an acceptance that the TV licence has to go. There should be an amnesty for non-payers. We have set out our point of view in some detail. We need to build RTÉ for the people. We need to invest in public service broadcasting, a 100% publicly funded public service broadcasting, including money to local broadcasters, newspapers and so on. We need a fund that media outlets could apply to and funding provided by taxing the big social media companies and big tech companies with a big-tech tax to raise €1 billion to fund that.

Unfortunately, that is not situation that we are in. Unfortunately, 60 people a day are still being dragged through courts to try to get them to pay the TV licence fee. That figure is going up so it is probably now 70 a day and in a couple of months it could be 80, 90 or 100 a day, clogging up our court system, using a huge amount of resources to try to extract this money that people do not want to pay and are refusing to pay. That needs to stop. There needs to be an amnesty for those who are refusing to pay.

The question arises as to why they are refusing to pay. Obviously, there has always been a level of non-payment but that shot up dramatically after all the scandal that emerged from RTÉ last summer. It was people seeing the €75,000 secret payments to Ryan Tubridy; the €5,000 on flip flops; more than €4,000 on membership of an exclusive club in London; and public money being spent on wining and dining advertising executives. At the same time, ordinary RTÉ workers were facing pay cuts, journalists were forced to record in café toilets and freelancers were paid as little as €120 for a report. People are reacting in protest to that.

They are also reacting, correctly, against what is an unjust tax. Earlier, the Minister referred to it as a regressive tax. That is a scientifically correct term. The poorest family in the country that is eligible to pay pays the same amount for access to RTÉ public service broadcasting as the richest in the country and, therefore, it should be abolished. The objection the Minister raised was that having an amnesty for those who have not paid is unfair on those who have paid. The Government could do what it did on water charges when it was forced to refund the money for those who paid. If that is what it takes for it to be a fair abolition of this licence fee, let us do it.

There is a big danger here. Many right-wing politicians salivated at the prospect of a scandal in RTÉ. Why was that? First, it took focus away from themselves for a little while. They were delighted to have a scandal that did not involve themselves. Second, it provided an opportunity to pursue a pre-existing agenda, which is an anti-public service broadcasting agenda. That is actually what has been happening. In a way we see here an example of a shock doctrine. A crisis comes along and an opportunity to pursue the pre-existing agenda is pursued to cut RTÉ down to size. There have been significant cutbacks. That is what is happening with the prospect of 400 jobs going and privatisation. Who will suffer? It will not be those at the top, those responsible for the corporate culture, governance and so on, but instead ordinary workers in RTÉ and, even more importantly, the public who will lose out through reduced public service broadcasting as a consequence of that. We need an alternative model.

Where did this all come from? At the Oireachtas committee, the RTÉ commercial director, Geraldine O'Leary, spelled it out. She said she was responsible for bringing in revenue of €1.65 billion and said that part of that job is maintaining relationships, that is people selling to people. The rot in RTÉ started with the reliance on advertising revenue - this dual funding model. That is the justification for the deals with Renault and other car companies; the money under the table, effectively, to Ryan Tubridy; and the flip flops. All of that comes from the need to attract advertising revenue.

The alternative is to scrap the regressive TV licence fee. It is to get rid of the reliance on advertising revenue and go for 100% properly publicly funded broadcasting. There should be pay caps with nobody in RTÉ on more than €100,000. We need to democratise the RTÉ board and then make the big social media giants pay for it. The alternative to investing in public service broadcasting is relying on billionaires. They may be billionaires we can agree with a little bit or disagree with a little bit such as Elon Musk, Zuckerberg or whoever else but these are the people determining what kind of news, what kind of information and what kind of entertainment people are getting. In reality, these social media giants are parasites on the media as a whole. We need to tax those and use it to fund a full-spectrum public service broadcasting throughout the country.

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