The high profile exit by Ray D’Arcy from RTÉ and the subsequent announcement of a shake-up of the daytime schedule on Radio 1 might, at first glance, look like the beginnings of long awaited reform at the state broadcaster – they’re not.
The fact that D’Arcy was being paid €250,000 a year for presenting a daily 1½ hour light entertainment show which was attracting an average audience of 182,000 listeners tells you everything you need to know about the level of dysfunction at RTÉ.
It’s worth recalling that RTÉ celebrity Ryan Tubridy, earning an eye-watering €440,000 at RTÉ, is now reputed to be earning something in the region of €80,000 a year with his new employers in the UK. You don’t need a degree in accounting to realise that RTÉ have been paying their talent massively over the odds of what their actual market value dictates. That’s the reality that eventually caught up with Ray D’Arcy.
When the Green Party’s Catherine Martin was appointed as Media Minister in 2020, one of her first policy announcements was the setting up of the Future of Media Commission to examine both the future of RTÉ and broader issues relating to a changing media landscape.
It sounded like an eminently sensible idea. However, five years on from the setting up of that commission its findings and outcome tell us more about Official Ireland and its relationship with the media than it does about what is needed to fix an obviously broken mainstream media.
One of the curious things about modern Ireland’s political ecosystem is that in spite of the welter of commissions, think tanks and the like it produces, there is little if any look back on the quality of decision making by these same bodies.
The Future of Media Commission is a case in point. If you haven’t already read their report published in July 2022 then you should. After all, as a taxpayer you helped to pay for it. Three years after its publication, its findings are particularly interesting in light of a changing media landscape.
Perhaps one of the most notable things about the Future of Media Commission was its composition. Appointed by Catherine Martin, the commission was composed largely of media academics and practitioners. The people who were definitely not represented were those who might best described as mainstream media sceptics. These are the people who have generally stopped watching RTÉ and stopped buying newspapers.
The collective view of the commission appears to have been that since these same people abandoned trusted news sources (mainstream media) they are now living in mythical rabbit holes where they are easy prey to online conspiracy theories and the like. That appears to have been a good enough reason to exclude such people in the first place.
While the commission was reflecting liberal Ireland in its constant trumpeting about things like diversity, the interesting thing is that it seemed strangely lacking itself in articulating a diversity of opinions about the media. Here you had the classic liberal scenario of different types of people with the same opinion as opposed to people with different opinions.
In hindsight, if anyone thought that the Future of Media Commission was going to subject RTÉ to some rigorous scrutiny they were in for a serious disappointment. Even from a distance, there are serious and fundamental questions about many of the functions and roles RTÉ is now fulfilling under the guise of it being a public service broadcaster.
Take 2FM as an example. When it was set up by RTÉ in 1979, it could be said that it was fulfilling a public service requirement of a type given the wild west setting of the time with its patchwork of illegal pirate music stations.
Today, there is a thriving network of commercial music and local radio stations which now provide the same type of service as 2FM. The key point here is that not only do these commercial stations arguably do a better job than 2FM but there is no public cost involved. The obvious question is – why is RTÉ (and the licence fee payer) still involved in running a quasi-commercial music station as part of its public service broadcasting remit?
It might seem like an obvious question but it’s one of the many obvious questions which the Future of Media Commission didn’t bother asking itself on our behalf. On the whole, their view appeared to be that public service broadcaster RTÉ was in rude health and doing a splendid job.
The one thing about RTÉ that the commission seemed to be most taken up with was its funding. In its report, much of the text dealing with RTÉ is given over to looking at various funding models. The issue, according to the Future of Media Commission, wasn’t what RTÉ was doing or not doing – it was about ways of funding RTÉ.
It wasn’t any great surprise that, when the commission’s report was published, one of its standout recommendations was that RTÉ should be put entirely on the state payroll thus eliminating the need for the TV licence. Clearly, while Catherine Martin may have been pleased with that even Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael baulked at that idea.
Either way, the commission’s findings were quickly overtaken by events when just months after its publication the skeletons started tumbling out of the wardrobe in Montrose with revelations about the Tubridy payments scandal as well as other governance issues.
At this remove, it seems that the Future of Media Commission’s scrutiny of RTÉ was more like a forecourt tyre kicking exercise than a forensic under the bonnet examination of the self-styled public service broadcaster. In the best traditions of Official Ireland, the findings of the Future of Media Commission appear to have been largely laid to one side in subsequent discussions involving the increasingly chaotic goings-on in Montrose.
As readers will be aware, the government eventually agreed to a three year €725m bail out of RTÉ. Given its unreformed structure, there is nothing to suggest that the state broadcaster will not need ongoing bailouts if it is to survive.
What is most striking about RTÉ these days is its lack of accountability and transparency. Anyone who has ever had dealings with a financial institution will know that, not surprisingly, the primary interest of funders usually around numbers with a view to protecting their investment.
Consider for one moment then how the taxpayer has been treated in the RTÉ bailout. It is the taxpayer – not the government – who are funding RTÉ’s €725m bailout. Yet where are the publicly available audience numbers for its television programmes?
This is not as outlandish a request as it might seem. Up until a decade ago, RTÉ’s top 10 TV programmes and their audience figures were published on a weekly basis in the RTÉ Guide. Surely, the funders of RTÉ’s bailout are entitled to this information? If RTÉ is a public service broadcaster then it should have no problem with publishing these as a matter of course.
All the evidence points to the fact that RTÉ is continuing to slip below the waves in terms of its audience share. That appears to be one of the secrets that Official Ireland is intent on keeping and one that the Future of Media Commission hardly interrogated.
Continuing on that maritime metaphor, it would appear that the latest goings on at Montrose are little more than a case of re-arranging the deckchairs on that same sinking ship.