‘You don’t have to love it, but you do have to pay it.’
Victimless crimes?
RTE should be free to take whatever campaigning stance that it wishes. But it should be free to do so only when the television licence and taxpayer funding for its activities is ceased.
And we’re all supposed to play along in a carefully staged play.
Not happening
Overall, the objective in healthcare should be to enact one or two small but popular and memorable policies, while leaving overall responsibility for healthcare in the hands of your coalition partners
Up until relatively recently, a politician in Ireland could watch the 6 and 9 news on RTE and get a broadly reliable sense of the news the country was seeing, and how, therefore, to calibrate their message.
Patrick Kielty is by all accounts a very fine fellow and a nice man, but the ratings do not lie. The public, in this first year at the helm for him, just isn’t buying what he’s selling.
The lack of any real reform to RTE in the months since the Tubridy payment scandal has been obvious, and once again blame for that should fall at the feet of the Chairwoman of the Board.
It does not speak well of Mr. Bakhurst that he would try something like this.
After all, one might also argue that given that this mess happened on her watch, the Minister for Communications has a moral obligation to resign and repay her own salary. Right?
A politician with the balls (forgive me) to stand up and say what a lot of people are thinking – that RTE 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.