Ms Emma O'Kelly:

I thank the committee for inviting us to attend. I am chair of the Dublin broadcasting branch of the NUJ, which is a voluntary role that I undertake as an RTÉ employee. The voice of staff has been missing from discourse in this chamber, so we are grateful for this opportunity to express the anger and frustration of NUJ members in RTÉ and also their views on the future.

It is not possible to address the issues before the committee in isolation from the climate that RTÉ has been forced to operate under for a long number of years and under which it continues to operate. RTÉ has been starved of necessary funding for decades by successive Governments. When we, the staff, spoke out over the summer, it was in direct response to the immediate crisis, but the real wellspring was the deep frustration and powerlessness we had felt for years as a result of severe underfunding. We have struggled as best we could for years, striving to deliver quality output for the public as budgets were slashed.

Away from any media glare, we in the NUJ have fought on issues such as gender equality and against excessive salaries and perks at the top. In 2019, we called for a cap on salaries. We also called for the abolition of, for example, the €25,000 executive car allowance. Years before that, we called for a review of employment contracts and contracts for service in RTÉ.

We look forward to the publication of the two expert reports – they are already overdue – but we are concerned at the insistence on delaying funding decisions while RTÉ continues to teeter on the brink of disaster. The licence fee model is no longer fit for purpose. We all know that. Public service media in this country urgently needs to be supported by means of a new funding model that is not only sustainable, but also equitable for the paying public. The level of funding needs to be adequate. Most Government and Opposition politicians have, over the summer months and since then, expressed their strong support for public service broadcasting, but without adequate funding, those words are hollow.

Regarding future plans for the organisation and as outlined in A new direction for RTÉ, the station's strategic vision document, staff are concerned that the organisation is effectively being held to ransom. The deal seems to be that, in return for some movement on funding, RTÉ must cut its workforce by one fifth and outsource a significant proportion of the work currently being done in house by people in proper jobs to the private sector. Four hundred jobs are to be suppressed. That will be 400 fewer full-time jobs in this wider creative sector for young people coming out of college, for example. We are concerned that those jobs will be replaced by mostly precarious short-term contracts in the private sector, where workers move from short-term contract to short-term contract with no rights to things like pensions, holiday pay or maternity leave. This is an environment that especially damages women. We are fully supportive of a thriving, growing independent sector, but we do not believe that it should be achieved at the expense of jobs in RTÉ. None of the governance failings or disgraceful excesses at RTÉ exposed since the summer had anything to do with the size of RTÉ or with us, its ordinary staff. The NUJ fears that this crisis is being used to drive through an entirely different agenda, namely, the privatisation of large swathes of RTÉ. This is something that we will oppose.

The use of bogus self-employment contracts is a stain on RTÉ’s reputation. The systematic misclassification of workers was an attempt to keep staff costs down, denying workers fundamental rights. While trade unions have sought an industrial relations solution to the issue of bogus self-employment, there are workers in RTÉ who are being forced to pursue legal options in the face of an obstinate employer.

Looking to the future and the new strategic plan, and despite all of the debate over the summer, we now look upon the prospect of RTÉ being driven further into the arms of the commercial sector and forced to move further down the road towards becoming a commissioning house. We have learned nothing from Dee Forbes’s first folly when she shut down young people’s programmes and outsourced the creation of all programming for young people. Under the new DG, we see plans to dismantle a further one fifth of the organisation via the replacement of content currently made in house with material sourced from the private commercial sector. This is sending RTÉ further down the wrong road.