RTÉ is an institutionally biased, intellectually shallow, and morally corrupt cesspit.
On the great issues of the day, it is a consistent and deliberate partisan actor in favour of left-wing and liberal causes and candidates. It elevates those parties and politicians who espouse the Montrose worldview, and it assassinates the characters of those who could present a challenge.
RTÉ’s guiding spirit is oikophobia: a dislike of one’s own country. This tends to revolve around Ireland’s dark, ghastly Catholic past and its frustratingly backward present. Its interests are not the public interest, but the fashionable and fickle interests of South Dublin.
The ideal outcome would be for the licence fee to be abolished, for the government’s shameful €725m bailout to be revoked and for the organisation to collapse once and for all.
All that being said, we are likely to have RTÉ to kick around for many years more. There are some good arguments in support of having a national broadcaster, and barring a political revolution in Ireland, no government will pull the plug on the one we have now.
In politics, the perfect should not become the enemy of the good. Incremental progress often needs to be the first priority, rather than constant discussion about the ultimate and unattainable objective.
It is worth considering therefore what steps could be taken to help RTÉ to live up to its stated purpose of being an “independent source of stories, news, information and entertainment for Ireland, reflecting the diversity of its people and providing experiences that enrich the lives of all.”
Three ideas spring to mind.
RTÉ’s Montrose base happens to be situated in an area that is more wealthy and more socially liberal than the rest of the country.
In 1983, the more affluent South Dublin constituencies rejected the Eighth Amendment, and the subsequent generational campaign to overturn that result emanated from RTÉ’s bailiwick.
In 2024, the country voted overwhelmingly against the government’s proposals to redefine family and take women out of the Bunreacht na hÉireann, but Dún Laoghaire said Yes to ‘durable relationships’ having constitutional status.
It has a real impact when so many people running the country are concentrated in one small area. The dogmatic support of the media class for large-scale immigration is directly related to the fact that most leading journalists live in areas which are not impacted by the effects of this process.
Writing in his classic work ‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s,’ Desmond Fennell pinpointed a social divide which was as obvious then as it is now:
“A minority of nice, reasonable, decent, sensitive, enlightened people are engaged in a struggle on many fronts against a majority of boorish malevolent rednecks. The Nice People are the Dublin liberal media class and their allies and supporters throughout the country. The Rednecks are everyone else…”
You cannot educate journalists who refuse to open their minds, but we could at least expose them to a greater measure of reality.
Moving RTÉ out of D4 would do that. Ideally, the national broadcaster should be based in the heart of the nation.
Sinn Féin used to believe in ‘Éire Nua,’ a plan which would involve moving the national capital to Athlone.
Why not leave Leinster House where it is and just move RTÉ west? Athlone is on the motorway: only an hour and twenty minutes from Dublin city centre. From that base, RTÉ journalists could traverse the country, covering all developments.
Given the way rural commuting works, the staff would likely become more dispersed across the Midlands, making it harder to form and sustain a narrow (and narrow minded) social clique.
The new location does not have to be Athlone – even a working-class area around the M50 (like Virgin Media’s base) would be an improvement.
In a country where the median annual salary is around €43,000, it is a moral outrage that television and radio presenters get paid multiples of this each year (or that they are commended for telling us about it).
Concentrating on the presenters is misguided though, as leading RTÉ media executives are sometimes outearning those household names.
According to the most recently-available figures, RTÉ’s Director General Kevin Bakhurst’s salary of €250,000 represents a ceiling which no other employee can break through.
Why should the ceiling be set so high?
Journalism is generally not a well-paid job, due to a number of factors including collapsing demand for traditional media, declining advertising revenue and an over-supply of graduates from journalism courses. Employers are in no position to offer very high salaries, and applicants are in no position to ask.
For too long, RTÉ’s staff have been able to escape the harsh realities of the overall sector, and their economic detachment has gone hand-in-hand with a more general detachment.
Throughout the world, a similar dynamic has unfolded, as outlined superbly in Batya Ungar-Sargon’s book, ‘Bad News,’ in which she describes how journalism has become a middle- and upper-class profession staffed almost exclusively with graduates of the right colleges who hold all the right views.
In Planet Montrose, as in CNN and elsewhere, affluent yet aggrieved young men and women see the purpose of journalism as being advancing Woke beliefs on race, gender and sexuality.
Worse still, top RTÉ stars have long pretended that exorbitant salaries are necessary in order to prevent Ireland’s best media talents from being poached by stations in Britain and elsewhere.
It is as if Claire Byrne or Miriam O’Callaghan’s sudden availability could set off a bidding war in Sky News or MSNBC, with major transfer fees being sought.
The football metaphor is appropriate here; FAI Chief Executive John Delaney long played a similar game where he maintained that his abnormally large salary paled in comparison with the alternative offers he had received and turned down.
If the highest salary in RTÉ was €100,000, it would still allow leading professionals within the organisation to earn more than twice the average salary for an Irish person, and it would close the gap between presenters and their audiences significantly.
Media bias is not about how news is reported; media bias is about what news is reported.
Journalism is not that difficult and one certainly does not need to spend four years in college learning how to do it.
It is relatively easy for even the most biased campaigning journalist to feign objectivity when writing a news story, carrying out an interview or moderating a debate.
The damage of biased journalism is generally done in ways that cannot be seen by the viewer. It happens behind closed doors when producers discuss which issues will be addressed, and which will be ignored.
Abortion is the most obvious example. Many of the media debates in the run-up to the 2018 were fair, in the sense of there being an equal number of opposing voices, or in terms of the allocated time being similar for both sides.
The background to all of the debates was the death by medical misadventure of Savita Halappanavar in 2012. The deluge of slanted media coverage following her death created an environment where the 2018 referendum result became an inevitability.
There are many other issues relating to abortion which could be interrogated by RTÉ, such as: the death of an Irish-based woman after receiving an abortion; the aborting of a healthy baby wrongly diagnosed as having a ‘fatal foetal abnormality;’ the strikingly rapid increase in the abortion rate; and so forth.
The exact same dynamic presents itself in other areas too. Too often, RTÉ coverage on immigration deliberately excludes the voices of working-class and rural communities being transformed against their will.
The successes of foreign politicians judged to be bad (like Trump in America or Milei in Argentina) are ignored, along with the obvious failures of left-wing politicians judged to be good.
Every sin of the Catholic Church is interrogated forensically, but every difficult question relating to Islam is verboten. Every lunacy-driven prediction of a climate apocalypse is reported as fact, and anyone who disagrees is ignored for their ‘climate denialism.’
RTÉ stacks the deck relentlessly. It prepares the battleground terrain to favour one side, and then reports with obvious satisfaction on that side’s victory.
Changing this behaviour would be much harder than relocating RTÉ or trimming the fat from its wage bill, but it could perhaps be done.
There is already an ineffective BAI-run complaints procedure, which suffers from the fact that the focus is on the coverage, rather than the choice of coverage.
One option to change that would be a continuous (and fully public) process of stakeholder input, where groups (everything including political parties, NGOs, charities, churches and advocacy groups) would put forward their suggestions as to what should be covered in the coming months.
RTÉ would be under no obligation to take this advice, but the establishment of a public record akin to the Register of Lobbying would allow everyone to see what topics were being suggested over a period of time, and to compare this with the record of what was actually covered. The suggestions of NGOs in particular could be studied carefully.
It might not save RTÉ from itself, and RTÉ is probably not worth saving. But it could help the national broadcaster to learn more about what the nation thinks and feels.