Viewers may have seen this show before. After a year of scandal-heightened, off-screen talk, the non-twist in the Government’s television licence fee saga is that everything will carry on much the same as it has always done, just with some better signposting for RTÉ.
The licence fee will still exist. It will still cost €160 a year. And, notwithstanding the €6 million An Post will receive to make “necessary enhancements” to its collection system, it is still likely to be paid only by householders who are already on its aged database, and, even then, only after the renewal notices grow too terse for comfort.
The storyline has altered a touch in that the amount the Government pumps in to make up the difference between licence fee receipts and the funding it believes RTÉ needs to maintain its services has been formalised into a multiannual agreement that will last, on this occasion, for three years. This change, though sensible in itself, won’t have any material impact on licence fee payers, though the figures involved will determine the level of output RTÉ’s audiences can expect to receive.
It is a reflection of the guessing games that public sector organisations must so often play that Taoiseach Simon Harris can describe setting out RTÉ’s funding for three years as “almost unprecedented” certainty, even though RTÉ is required by law to prepare strategy documents lasting five.
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In any case, such multiannual funding deals are common among European public service broadcasters. This one won’t be the envy of too many of them, though it has had the effect of reinvigorating calls for funding from elsewhere in the Irish media. It is ominous that Virgin Media Television, which as part of Virgin Media is owned by the multinational telecommunications giant Liberty Global, went as far as to say it had “no alternative but to review all options”.
Predictably, RTÉ’s public funding allocation of €225 million in 2025, €240 million in 2026 and €260 million in 2027 – which includes whatever An Post can whip up from the licence fee – is less than what it sought. As Dr Roddy Flynn of Dublin City University’s School of Communications told Morning Ireland, the figures seem “randomly chosen”, the rationale for them unclear.
It is not known what, if any, cuts RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst will have to make to its existing operations or its future plans as a result of the apparent €55 million difference between what it asked for in the negotiations and what the Government has agreed to fund.
RTÉ was already on track to slash its headcount by 400 people, or about a fifth, through a combination of redundancies and retirements by 2028. Other on-screen cutbacks have been implemented for 2024, while Bakhurst signalled in June that flagship programmes would eventually be made outside Montrose. Several previously trailed measures – including an initial voluntary redundancy scheme this year and the suggestion that Fair City’s production be outsourced – notably have the capacity to trigger substantial upfront costs.
Sands shift fast in broadcasting. Every government funding intervention has taken place not only in the context of dwindling licence fee receipts but also amid a cloudy long-term outlook for commercial revenues. This year, meanwhile, has been an expensive one for sports rights. A general election, whenever it happens, will further inflate RTÉ’s “special events” tab. Its timing could mean that this multiannual funding agreement winds up being a once-off.
The protracted wrangling among Cabinet members on this issue has come to an end for the summer, but the script the Government cobbled together has not exactly delivered the biggest bombshell in the history of television. The next episode is unlikely to be much of a departure.
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