Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 10 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Future Funding of Public Service Broadcasting: Discussion

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

I apologise for not being here earlier but I had questions in the Dáil Chamber. It is unthinkable that the public service broadcaster would not continue to exist and flourish because it always has played and always should play an absolutely key role in Irish society and cultural life and in its role in journalism. As I do not know how many of these questions Deputy Bríd Smith has put to the witnesses, I apologise if I am repeating anything she said. Ms Forbes does not help her cause if she defends things that are indefensible in the minds of many people who might otherwise support her. Ms Forbes does not help her cause if she sees the solution to the financial crisis of RTÉ as being essentially to dip into the pockets of ordinary people or saving RTÉ at the expense of its employees and the quality and extent of its services. Ms Forbes will actually damage her own cause in trying to defend RTÉ and the public service broadcasting.

The point has been well made but I just want to emphasise the cultural importance of Lyric FM. It is a unique guardian of music culture, including original music, new music, classical music and international music. It brings music that is not heard by a mass audience to a mass audience, that is, music that might not otherwise be heard by a mass audience. It would be incredibly retrograde to even consider winding it down, reducing it or getting rid of it altogether, not to mention the human cost for people who relocated to Limerick and so on.

Ms Forbes knows the things that are unpopular with people. This is not in any way to get at individuals but whatever justification there might have been for people getting paid hundreds of thousands of euro, when there was a genuine possibility some of them might go to England or somewhere else, is gone now. As that is not going to happen in the age of Google, Amazon and Netflix, it would help Ms Forbes's cause with the public if she talked about a cap on salaries. It is just not conscionable that people would be paid salaries higher than the Taoiseach for broadcasting. It is just not defensible. People went to jail over the licence fee because they could not afford to pay it. In the case of a lot of people who do not pay, it is because they cannot pay. Ms Forbes would be better off focusing on how there was a cut in the amount RTÉ got from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, which was capped and on getting that money back, as well as on measures like retransmission fees, digital taxes and so on.

The last point I want to make is that the biggest card RTÉ should play is in the area of original, culturally important output. Arts and culture in this country are massively underfunded. It is 0.1% of GDP, as against an average of 0.6% in Europe, and we should point to that. We should address the salaries and bring them down. We should of course be efficient but in fact, we should be expanding original, dramatic output and stuff that is relevant to the culture. We should be making the argument for that.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.