Dr. Roderick Flynn:

I have given it some thought. Rather than just thinking in terms of the publisher-broadcaster model, I will suggest another model. I have not worked through the maths of this, and when RTÉ hears this it may say "Oh sweet Lord, let him not speak any further". Imagine a world where RTÉ was told, as TV3 was told back in 1998, that RTÉ can no longer have commercial funding, and that RTÉ was given exclusive access to a properly gathered public source of funding, for example a household broadcasting charge. I did bother doing the maths on this part of the piece to try to figure out what this would mean for RTÉ. The back of the envelope estimate is that RTÉ would take, in a properly collated and collected situation, about €250 million per year. Now imagine that RTÉ is not thinking like a commercial broadcaster as well as a public service broadcaster, as it has to do at the moment. This would probably mean that it would stop doing some things it does now that we think of as fundamental to its identity. It would probably mean that it would stop going after a large sporting events, for example. This might be a terrifying concept but those large sporting events are going to be made available on a free-to-air basis because they are protected under the Broadcasting (Major Events Television Coverage) (Amendment) Act 2003, and because other broadcasters are going to want them. There will be demand for them. This would mean that RTÉ would probably focus on news and current affairs, which arguably is already its specific mandate. It would go into drama, which is expensive, such as local drama, but sometimes it is hard to financially recoup those resources from the local market. It would also do children's content, more broadly, and also arts and culture. It becomes something a bit more like-----