Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It would be grossly unfair, but it is looking like it may well be the case, that the public and workers who did absolutely nothing wrong will pick up the tab for the scandals that emerged in RTÉ.

8 o’clock

They will be collateral damage for the lack of governance and the bad behaviour of some people. That appear to be a likely outcome for hundreds of jobs, not those of the well-paid, high-profile people on obscene salaries, but those of the crew and technical people.

I heard somebody describe it as an upstairs-downstairs culture. I heard in the audiovisual industry an incredible phrase referring to "above-the-line people" and "below-the-line people". The "below-the-line people" will end up being the ones who get it in the neck, with their jobs suppressed. That does not just affect them, but also young people, who the Minister should be concerned about, training in audiovisuals, getting degrees and going to college in all sorts of technical grades, camera work, hair and make-up and all the rest of it. Those jobs are disappearing or being outsourced and privatised.

At the forum the Minister's Department organised last week and for which some of us campaigned long and hard, people working in the film industry referred over and over again to the precarity of their work and the lack of security of income and employment. In one of the places such security existed and where there were career opportunities for people qualified in technical grades in the audiovisual sector and in all the things that make television, their jobs will be suppressed. That will impact on the quality of public sector broadcasting and the range of services such broadcasting provides. Culture, arts, entertainment and music will lose out and be outsourced and privatised.

Who benefits from all of this? As has been said, it is the big private digital corporations which are increasingly coming to control our media and are guilty of at least being conduits for disinformation, hate, division and all sorts of not so great things in our society. None of that means RTÉ was perfect or anything like it. We need reform but at least with a public sector broadcasting system the public has some influence on the situation. If it is all outsourced and privatised, we will have none and the Musks and the social media companies will control our media. That is why we need to scrap the licence and fund public sector broadcasting with a tax on those social media companies.

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