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

People Before Profit strongly supports public service broadcasting and believes we need to ensure the maintenance of public service broadcasting. The suggestion that we may not have RTÉ in a few of years because of inadequate funding is very alarming. This is something that we have to prevent from taking place. We need our national public service broadcaster and we need to have a clear statement of intent from this House that we are going to do what is necessary in order to maintain the national broadcaster and public service broadcasting.

We have to address the funding and financial issues. There are certain things which in my opinion should be ruled out right from the outset. Having said that we need to maintain our national broadcaster and public service broadcasting, we should also state clearly that ordinary workers in RTÉ, or ordinary householders, should not be made to pay the price for the financial crisis or the lack of funding for public service broadcasting. It is important - I will address the issue of high salaries for the top presenters - that we need to clarify in the minds of the public that the vast majority of people working in RTÉ are not massively or highly paid and should not become the fall guys and victims for the financial plight that RTÉ now finds itself in.

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We will certainly support the workers in Limerick who are fighting to save their jobs and retain Lyric FM in Limerick. There should be no question of it being moved.

Equally, we state our clear support for those who work with the RTÉ Guideand challenge the logic behind selling it. It makes little or no sense, given that it is profitable, selling 35,000 to 40,000 copies a week - a lot more are sold at Christmas time - and there is plenty of scope for it to move in the direction of becoming more digital. It is unfair that the workers are being told that it will be sold under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations, whereby they cannot seek redeployment within RTÉ or redundancy. That is not right. We should not accept the idea that they are victims of the current financial crisis; nor should ordinary journalists, crew members, cameramen and all of the various others who work for it have pay austerity further imposed on them because of the funding crisis.

Beyond that, we need to recognise that the lack of funding for public service broadcasting is a symptom of a wider problem resulting from the failure of this and successive Governments and the political system to take culture seriously. RTÉ and public service broadcasting are not only about news and current affairs programmes; they are also about supporting, projecting, developing and deepening our culture. In this country we do not take the arts and culture seriously. We provide a pathetically low level of funding for the arts generally, something we debated here in recent weeks. Certainly, I have made the point repeatedly that there is an abysmal level of funding for the arts and culture, way below the European average, at 0.1% of GDP as against the European average of 6%. It is particularly terrible that this should be the case in a country, the international reputation of which for most people is based on our rich cultural heritage and the output of our artists, writers, poets, musicians, actors, theatre-makers, as well as Irish film and drama productions, etc. We give little or no support to the sector, which is utterly pathetic. It shows a philistine attitude on the part of the Government that it does not take the arts and culture as seriously as it should. In that sense, any state that takes the arts and culture seriously sees a public service broadcaster as being central to them. In fact, we have been moving in the opposite direction, with the volume of new dramatic and film output from RTÉ reducing dramatically in recent years because of the lack of funding and support. We should be moving in precisely the opposite direction.

Not that we can hope to ever compete or particularly even want to compete at the level of Netflix and Amazon, something we can take from them is that people tune in to them because they carry a lot of new original film and dramatic content. If we want the volume of Irish cultural and dramatic output to increase, we need to invest, unless we are going to rely on the for-profit sector, which I do not believe we should and which I do not believe will deliver the cultural and artistic output we want. We have to invest in institutions such as RTÉ and public service broadcasting generally in order to increase dramatic and cultural output.

The key question is how can it be funded. I do not believe it should be funded yet again by reaching into the pockets of ordinary householders and by attacking the wages and conditions of workers. For the record, our policy is that anywhere in the public sector - I am not singling out RTÉ in that regard - those paid from the public purse should not be receiving more than €100,000 a year. I am sure it is a tiny group in RTÉ who are paid in excess of that amount, but they should not. There should be a cap on pay, but the vast majority of workers in it who are on ordinary or medium range pay and conditions should not see their them being attacked further. Cutting or even capping the pay of the very highest earners, however, would not solve the financial crisis at RTÉ. As for how we would fund it without reaching into the pockets of ordinary people for broadcasting fees or higher television licence fees, there should not be a cap on the contribution of the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection for those who receive a free television licence. If its contribution was not capped, there would be more coming in from that Department. We should immediately impose re-transmission fees on companies such as Sky, Virgin Media and Vodafone which re-transmit public service output but do not pay a fee in doing so so. If they then state they will not transmit it, we should tell them that they will not be allowed to broadcast at all in this country. If they were paying re-transmission fees, it would bring €15 million into the coffers.

Critically - this is the really important point, given that advertising revenue is migrating from public service broadcasting, RTÉ and more traditional media to social media outlets such as Facebook and Google - on a global level, 80% of all advertising revenue is now going to such companies. Therefore, we need to impose a tax on them. That is from where we will get the money, but, of course, the Government will not do it. It is allowing them to continue to benefit from massive tax loopholes. If, as I believe, the European Union is correct in the Apple case, etc., the Government helped to engineer tax loopholes to enable the company to avoid its tax responsibilities. If a digital tax was imposed and other tax loopholes which are benefiting these considerable companies in making astronomical profits from digital advertising and more generally in this country were closed, we could generate billions of euro in extra revenue for the State generally and provide the resources and revenue necessary to deal with the funding crisis at RTÉ and in public service broadcasting., as well as putting extra revenue into public service broadcasting to increase the volume of artistic and cultural output. That is where we should look for the money, rather than attack workers' pay and conditions or, for that matter, reach into the pockets of ordinary householders.

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