Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy does not have to call in the doctor yet.

The context in which this issue is being raised is that €134 million out of the €214 million raised by the television licence fee goes directly to RTE. There is another sum of money that goes to RTE through the broadcasting fund, a fund of about €10.6 million allocated for other broadcasters for which RTE can apply for funding. In that context we are right to engage with RTE.

The licence fee is the very same amount as what most people will be asked to pay for an unlimited supply of water, €160 a year. While I was walking in this morning, I was listening to "Morning Ireland" and they were posing the question of how Irish Water anticipates it is going to pursue the non-payers. An Post, the agent for RTE, pursues 16,566 non-payers through court summonses. It is important that we would bear in mind that there is a public service element to what RTE does and people are bound by the law to pay for it. They cannot opt in or out and do not get a broadcasting conservation grant for it.

The issue of bias is important, as is safeguarding independence and learning lessons from the awful "Mission to Pray" programme, which had no editorial oversight whatsoever On top of that there was the presidential election in which, as I have said in this committee before, a person I was never going to vote for - and a lot of people were never going to vote for him - basically had the presidency snatched out his hands by an RTE programme within a week of the election. I know lessons were learned from it but it was too late in that context. I think that programme changed the Presidency, a very serious accusation which I have made before. We are in the run-up to an election now and Mr. Bakhurst mentioned that levels of representation would be monitored around the election. That is important but I think it should happen all the time.

There was a recent episode of the Claire Byrne show where a person who was portraying himself as an independent commentator went out to France to see how it operates. He was sent out by RTE to look at the French economy and social model. He was not independent at all because if one Googles his name and the word "politics", one will find that Eamon Dunphy has openly said that he votes for and supports Sinn Féin.

He is entitled to do that, but I wonder where was the editorial research that went into sending him to France and to putting him up against the Minister of State at the Department of Finance under the auspices of being independent when he was no more independent than any of the people sitting on this side of the room. I would have imagined that if one were to send someone out to appraise the French social and economic model that one would do what was said, namely, to send someone independent. That did not happen, and the incident happened after all of the other editorial gaffes we saw previously. I wonder whether we have learned anything.

Deputy Michael Moynihan referred to regional imbalance. One of the greatest examples of the total lack of balance in current affairs occurred last year in the height of the summer. It was not the fault of RTE in Limerick, it was the fault of RTE in Dublin. Tens of thousands of people were in Limerick for the city of culture events, yet the coverage they received in news bulletins could only be described as an afterthought. However, if two pigs were flying up O’Connell Street at the moment it would be the No. 1 news item on RTE. That is the reason people who are paying their television licence have turned the dial to local and commercial radio stations around the country. On several occasions previously we discussed the JNLR figures on commercial radio stations at local level, community radio stations and regional radio stations. People have switched to tune into them in their tens of thousands. One is more likely to hear the corncrake than to hear a local voice on the national broadcaster between 9 a.m. and 12 noon. Deputy Moynihan is correct. Commercial radio stations across the country provide a public service remit. Does RTE agree that it provides a public service remit? The commercial stations are blocked from getting anything from the fund for public service broadcasting, namely, the television licence because €134 million out of €214 million goes directly to RTE regardless of whether it has any regional balance.

I have two final questions which I asked previously of the director general, Mr. Bakhurst, and of RTE every time it has come before the committee. One relates to the reason the company insists on fixing things that are not broken. "Question Time" is running on the BBC. Mr. Bakhurst has plenty of knowledge of that. The formula is not broken and the programme has been running for years. There was the very same model in this country which showed ample balance. There was no bias. John Bowman was able to weed out the plants week in and week out. He could identify the people who were planted there by political parties of all persuasions, including my own. He was very adept at doing it, yet the programme was axed. That was a big mistake because it was a fantastic programme and it weeded out any potential bias. Why did RTE get rid of the programme given that the BBC has a long history of the very same format week in and week out which goes around the United Kingdom?

RTE recently did a very important job in terms of nepotism in the political sphere. I assume RTE is not in any way guilty of that itself. There was wall-to-wall coverage last week about political nepotism in terms of people who work with Deputies who may have given of their time for nothing in many cases up to the time when the Deputy got elected. I presume RTE would not be guilty of nepotism itself, and that if we were to trawl through the HR files in RTE we would not find sons, daughters, wives and husbands of people working out there.

Why is it that a company that gets €134 million from the public - €160 from every house in the country, which is the very same amount as they are being asked to pay for water - will not disclose what presenters are being paid? Why does that have to be dragged out of the company? We are told that we might find out in two years' time.