Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for clarifying the bit about what will happen in the mean time but the plan as clearly stated in the report is to give the job of collecting the TV licence fee to Revenue. I further point out that the report is also ambivalent about whether it will give RTÉ the right to collect re-transmission fees from the likes of Sky and Virgin, whose profits I have just quoted, who also re-transmit a lot of our GAA games and indigenous programmes. Again, this is trying to put the blame, responsibility and financial onus back on ordinary people who consume TV, be it through a laptop, iPhone or iPad and I think it is outrageous. Any argument that we need to up our game in terms of collecting revenue is not acceptable because when one looks at what the Government has done in the Finance Bill and taxation levels from the likes of Apple, REITs, vulture funds and the construction industry which get away with blue murder in not paying their fair share of tax, one can see that the Government cannot justify loading it on to ordinary people.

The most extraordinary thing in justifying this was listening to Deputies, particularly those from Fianna Fáil, who actually said at the committee that Facebook is a threat to democracy. Hello - what is that about? Facebook is a threat to democracy because ordinary people can access and interact with it, say what they feel and think and can learn more than they ever did from RTÉ. Facebook is a threat to democracy but yet so many people complain and often refuse to pay their TV licence, as my colleagues on this side of the House would have done, for many years because they were not allowed to be broadcast on RTÉ. What is this business about a threat to democracy and the need to do this broadcasting funding model on the basis of improving the openness of what we access in terms of media? It is nonsense. Tell every child out there or even people my age who increasingly use it that Facebook is a threat to democracy and see the answer you get. This is an outrageous model and I hope that between now and when the Bill is put out that many Deputies will get behind the arguments I am making here and stop it coming through.

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