Consider the following facts, all of which are undisputed: Nine senior members of the RTÉ governance team declined to attend an Oireachtas hearing yesterday into the ongoing mess at the organisation, with some of them pleading health concerns. Of those who did attend, RTÉ Chairwoman Siún Ní Raghallaigh grandiosely announced that RTE had experienced “serious deficiencies in governance” and that there had been “a failure of oversight” in relation to Toy Show, the Musical.
In perhaps the most hilarious statement ever made to an Oireachtas Committee, new RTÉ head honcho Kevin Bakhurst “paid tribute to the work of the Oireachtas media committee and the Public Accounts Committee “in probing important issues of expenditure, governance and professional standards” and notes that the matters at the heart of the McCann FitzGerald report on redundancy payments “may not have come to light without you”.
Read that again, if you missed it: The Head of RTÉ is saying that without the Oireachtas investigating, the public might never have found out the contents of a McCann FitzGerald report that was on his own desk. Either he mis-spoke badly, or he is effectively telling the committee that if they don’t ask, he’s not going to tell them.
The following statement is simply a statement of fact: If you behaved like this before the Irish (or any other) courts system, you’d find yourself next door to Enoch Burke in Mountjoy, in the wing reserved for those who are in contempt of court. Contemptuous is the only word that works, if one wants to describe how RTÉ are treating both the Oireachtas, and the public.
Not that one’s anger on behalf of the Oireachtas is really matched, in any way, by anger from the Oireachtas itself: The political parties that make up our parliament, rather than seeking to punish RTÉ for their behaviour, are instead lining up to seek to save it and “put it on a certain footing”. One party – people before profit – wishes to levy a new tax on the private sector in order to gift RTÉ an annual half-billion in funding. Sinn Fein wishes to abolish the TV licence, but only so it can avoid the unpleasantness with the public, and write RTÉ an annual cheque out of current revenue receipts – money that might otherwise go to health and education. Some politicians want to tax computers, Netflix subscriptions, and even just households via a household charge – just to fork over the money to this lot.
It’s no wonder there are so many political sex scandals world-wide, because if this is anything to go by, our lot in Ireland absolutely have what I believe is referred to as a humiliation kink.
Against all of this, there is very little evidence that the public have any great desire to keep funding RTÉ at all. Polls on both Gript and other news sites are entirely unscientific, but I thought it notable that over on the website of our very well-to-do progressive friends at The Journal, “don’t fund it” was by far the most popular option amongst their readers when they asked yesterday how RTÉ should be funded moving forward.
Politicians appear to have interpreted the licence fee non-payment campaign (or phenomenon) as something it is not: They’re treating it as a rejection by the public of the TV licence as a funding mechanism for RTÉ, and trying as a result to find alternative ways of funding the broadcaster. This is either deliberate, or accidental ignorance. The TV licence was a perfectly workable funding model for RTÉ for decades, and caused no major issues. People didn’t suddenly get upset about the idea of paying for RTÉ via a licence.
They got upset about the idea of paying for RTÉ, full stop.
Nor, by the way, is the great turning of backs on Montrose simply limited to the licence fee: It’s one of those things that the media are loathe to talk about, but the viewing figures for the Late Late Show, the station’s flagship programme, are in the toilet, so much so that the media had to resort to claiming that the 399,000 viewers of last weekend’s “Valentines Special” represented “the show making its way back into people’s hearts”. By way of comparison, the first episode of the new season had over 800,000 viewers. If keeping half your audience represents a “bounce back”, well, things aren’t great.
All of this, I think, points to a growing chasm between politicians and the public: The politicians love RTÉ, even as it ritually humiliates them in their own house. The public, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst increasingly hostile to the set-up in Montrose.
A politician with the balls (forgive me) to stand up and say what a lot of people are thinking – that RTÉ should be cut loose from public funding and left to its own devices – might quickly win the hearts and minds of a great many more voters than conventional wisdom suggests.
Alas, as ever, our politicians are going to try everything else, first. Including taking as many more ritual humiliations from RTÉ management as it takes.