In 1997, Donegal voters registered their disgust at a proposal to shut down the network of masts their community had built over the years to ensure reception of Match of the Day, Top of the Pops and all the other riches of what was then still called multichannel land.
Their election of Thomas Gildea as a “TV Deflector” candidate is now regarded as a quirky footnote of Irish political history. In fact, it was a rare eruption into mainstream discourse of a truth understood by everyone but rarely discussed. Irish people consume a lot of British media.
From the earliest days of UK television, its signals were available along Ireland’s east coast and in its Border counties. From the 1970s onwards, cable operators extended its reach into towns and villages across the State.
As a result, the viewing of UK television has long been seen as an inalienable right, codified in the years after the Belfast Agreement by requiring cable and satellite platforms to make each jurisdiction’s channels available in the other.
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Meanwhile, in both the Republic and the UK, the place of the “national broadcaster” as a key instrument of national identity and national cohesion persists, despite the fragmentation of media itself.
It’s a little surprising, then, that amid the rising volume of debate about the possibility of Irish reunification, there has been little or no discussion about what would happen to the existing arrangements for publicly-funded media in a united Ireland.
If you were setting up a public service media framework from scratch, it would not look like the cash-strapped and often threadbare reality we have now
Later this year, a joint team of academics from the University of Ulster and Dublin City University will publish a paper addressing that exact question. At a recent seminar in Dublin, the issues they are exploring were discussed. Some, such as funding models or the role of regional coverage, are relatively practical although they could also be politically contentious.
Others might appear more abstract but go to the heart of debate about constitutional change. And others again relate to a different existential question: what would the term “public service media” even mean by the time unification happens
If unity were to take place in, say, 15 years’ time, will daily printed newspapers still exist? That’s debatable, given circulation trends. And if linear broadcast TV and radio as we currently know them are still around, similar trends suggest they will be of little relevance to the majority of the population.
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So what happens to RTÉ, BBC, TG4, UTV, Channel 4, Coimisiún na Meán and all the other pieces that make up the complicated jigsaw of broadcasting on this island? And where do newspaper websites, local radio, YouTubers, podcasters and who knows what else might emerge in the coming decade fit in?
Father of the BBC, John Reith’s conception of a mission to “inform, educate and entertain” has been subjected to such radical change over the years that its originator would hardly recognise the result. Many changes were positive – private sector competition and opening the sector up to independent producers brought dynamism and diversity.
But if you were setting up a public service media framework from scratch now, it would not look like the cash-strapped and often threadbare reality we have now. Both RTÉ and the BBC are struggling to retain younger audiences and face political indifference or even hostility. With its deeper pockets and larger scale, the BBC is making a better fist of the fight.
So would it make sense for a complete break if and when unity happens? Viewers in Northern Ireland no doubt have some affection for the various programmes produced locally and transmitted as part of the national feeds from the mother ship in London.
Unity, if it comes, will not be a crude replacement of one flag by another. It will need to reflect the complex relationships not just between North and South but between Ireland and Britain.
One can easily imagine some version of these continuing within any new, 32-country framework. But what about the BBC’s menu of national radio stations, now extended into its excellent Sounds app? Or the trove of drama, news and entertainment content on iPlayer, increasingly the backbone of the BBC’s proposition to its licence fee payers?
With Sounds due to be made UK-only later this year, and iPlayer already geo-restricted, the golden age of Irish freeloading may be drawing to a close. Will we end up with a new version of single channel land?
Some of these questions cropped up during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. Pro-independence campaigners argued that a straightforward divvying up of the spoils on a pro-rata basis would allow a new Scottish Broadcasting Corporation to stand on its own two feet. Others disagreed, pointing to the economies of scale which Scotland benefited from within the UK.
Similar structural arguments will be heard if and when a Border poll takes place in Ireland. But they rather miss the point. The pro-unity argument – and the counter- narrative in favour of Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom – are at heart cultural and political. That puts media at the centre of the debate.
Most opinion polling on cultural attitudes towards unity has focused on people’s attachment to symbols like flags and anthems. But writing in the 1980s, political scientist Benedict Anderson argued that media plays a central role in what he described as the “imagined community” of the nation state. Anderson was referring to print media, whose power would wane in the 40 years that followed. But he could just as easily have been talking about broadcasting or digital.
Unity, if it comes, will not be a crude replacement of one flag by another. It will need to reflect the complex relationships not just between North and South but between Ireland and Britain. There’s no better example of those than our intertwined media ecologies.
Rather than running the BBC out of Belfast – surely an unappealing prospect no matter what side of the divide you’re on – why not look to the example of the Nordic countries, who punch well above their weight in film and TV production by co-operating across borders? Perhaps we could even extend the iPlayer to Donegal. That might win a few votes.
