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

I was grimly amused by the Tánaiste's accusing others of ideological obsessions in response to an earlier question. Surely the ideological obsession that is most evident is that of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to privatise everything that moves, whether it is selling public land to private developers for housing or the issue I want to raise, public service broadcasting.

It has been about a year since a scandal erupted in RTÉ which centred on the behaviour of a tiny group of people at the top of that organisation, whether presenters or people running the organisation, of malgovernance and obscene salaries. The net result of that scandal, of the bad behaviour of and excessive pay to a tiny group of people, we learn, is the outsourcing and privatisation of the two flagship programmes of RTÉ, "Fair City" and "The Late Late Show", and the loss of hundreds of jobs of ordinary workers who had no hand, act or part in the malgovernance that took place or the obscene salaries enjoyed by a few at the top. The people who will lose out are the technical workers, the costume workers, the makeup workers, staging, editing, camera, scripting and floor managers. These are people on modest salaries, many of whom had to fight for years even to get proper contracts. Some of them are still only on temporary contracts. These are the people who will lose their jobs. Those jobs will be outsourced to the private sector. This is particularly ironic considering that it was the corrosive influence of the commercial sector on shows such as "The Late Late Show" that led people to think they should be paid these obscene salaries in the first place and that produced things such as the barter accounts over business deals with the private sector.

The consequence we now face is that the whole thing - lock, stock and barrel - will be handed over to the commercial, for-profit sector, which is characterised by poor working conditions, lack of pension entitlements and employment insecurity. The workers believe that RTÉ is just stringing along the people who work on "Fair City" and that, in reality, this will be the beginning of the end of "Fair City". Privatisation is the net result of bad behaviour. What the Government should have done, and what it should still do, is stop this privatisation, stop the axing of jobs and fund public service broadcasting properly by imposing a tax on the profits of social media and ICT companies instead of a regressive and failing TV licence funding model, which is completely inadequate. Will the Government intervene in this to protect the jobs of ordinary workers and to safeguard the future of public service broadcasting for our society?

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