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

I thank the Chair and committee for allowing me in on this discussion.

We are in a pretty grim and tragic situation. We are coming up to the budget, where I would like to argue – and will argue, despite all of this – that we are not putting enough public investment into arts and culture generally, including public service broadcasting. We are way below the European average for investment in those areas. The budget was cut last year, disgracefully in my opinion. We should be debating the need for more investment in arts, culture, public service broadcasting and the people who make those things happen. Instead, we are on the back foot because of a scandal around a small group of people at the top of the public service broadcaster being paid excessive salaries, secret payments to top up those salaries and an array of allowances that, it has been generally acknowledged, are excessive.

The question is how we are going to get out of this hole. The worst of all things has now happened. The exact thing that should not have happened is the people who are in no way guilty in any of this are now collateral damage, namely, the public who, because of the announcement we heard today, will suffer. I would like to hear commentary on this. If there is a recruitment freeze, it means the quality of public sector broadcasting will decline as long as that is in place. Journalists are telling us, and I believe it is true, that we do not have enough people on news teams and need more staffing in front-line areas. That means already the quality of public service broadcasting is threatened with being degraded, so the public will lose. That is an unacceptable situation. Digital services, precisely an area in which we need more investment, have been mentioned.

Given that this has all been about those excessive salaries, should the witnesses not have come in today with proposals for salary caps? Salary caps at the top would have addressed one of the key areas. I have looked at the detail and while I accept the GDPR point about the 100 top people, we could get more information. If you look at public sector pay, you get grades, roles and the salaries associated with them so there is transparency around those things. We have not got that level of information. The public is entitled to it if we are going to develop a new funding model. I ask the witnesses to seriously consider that.

If I hear the numbers correctly on bogus self-employment, they illustrate the contrast between how the majority of workers were treated and what was happening at the top level of RTÉ. If I hear the figures right, the majority of people who have fought cases against RTÉ on the question of being wrongly categorised as self-employed have won their cases. Why was RTÉ resisting them when clearly they were employees and should have been treated as employees? Why is RTÉ still spending a lot of money resisting the rights of the front-line workers who create the content? I ask you to address that.