The precipitous decline in influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is usually attributed to the sex and paedophilia scandals of the 1990s, which shattered the moral authority of many Priests and Bishops. Yet, this only tells one part of the story. In the most recent census, for example, 70% of Irish people still chose to identify as Catholic. Contrast this with the United Kingdom, where the King’s established Church of England (which, for all the talk of catholic power here, holds a much more privileged position in the constitution that Irish Catholicism ever did) has seen a much more rapid collapse in membership and church attendance than the Irish church has. Even without a fraction of the sex scandals.
There’s a similar pattern right across the English-speaking world: Even in the United States, that most religiously entrepreneurial of societies, almost all major denominations are in decline while atheism grows.
There might be something, then, to the idea that the Irish church would have gone into its present decline – though perhaps more slowly – even had every Irish Priest and Nun lived as they vowed to live.
I mention this because it will be popular to link RTE’s present woes in terms of public opinion to the recent scandal surrounding Ryan Tubridy’s pay. The opinion poll from the Irish Times on Friday paints a stark picture in that regard: A huge majority of voters do not want to give RTE any money. Almost half of those expressing an opinion do not intend to pay their TV licence. A clear plurality – and a majority of those expressing an opinion – are glad that Tubs himself is now eligible for the dole.
Yet it seems to me that, much like the Catholic Church, RTE would have ended up in this position sooner or later anyway, regardless of scandal. The scandal may have sped things up, in both instances, but societal trends were running against both institutions anyway.
The cases of both the church, and so-called “public service broadcasting” are cases of formerly dominant institutions struggling to come to terms with the information era that began in the early 1980s and has accelerated apace since then. Just as access to the internet facilitated the free flow of ideas and the questioning of previously accepted standards of morality and belief, so has that same era shattered the monopoly on truth previously held by state broadcasters.
I say “monopoly on truth”, because in both cases that is what has been lost: In the west, no church now speaks with the sole voice of unquestioned truth. And neither does any national broadcaster.
It suits the rest of the media to pretend that RTE’s woes are more about pay than content, but there’s little evidence that this is true: TV licence evasion has been rising for years. Audiences have been falling. Every year, trust in the mainstream media, of which RTE is the leading voice, falls further in public surveys of trust. What we’re seeing here is not scandal-driven, but part of a longer-term societal rejection of organisations that claim ultimate authority.
In that context, you can probably trace RTE’s present woes more directly to the covid pandemic than you can to the Tubridy pay scandal: That was when the national broadcaster decided to do the equivalent of invoking papal infallibility on the most significant issue of the day, delivering a relentlessly one-sided, pro-state account of the news to the public. Some people, of course, lapped it up. But for hundreds of thousands of people with access to the internet, and other news sites from both Ireland and around the world, it was likely the moment when trust in RTE’s impartiality and objectivity was finally shattered.
You can see that, obviously, in the poll numbers supplied by the Irish Times: Support for funding RTE, while below 20% in every age group, rises with age. The people who support RTE the most, like the people who support the Church the most, are the oldest people in Irish society – also those least likely to have embraced alternative sources of information.
RTE and the Church also share what might be called an attitude problem: When you are used to being in a dominant position, it is very hard to adjust to a new reality and embrace a little humility, or the fact that you suddenly need to compete for the trust of a public that once trusted you implicitly. Hence, the resistance to change within RTE, and the persistent belief that the Government will bail them out with only minimal changes to the way things have always been.
They might well be right, this time. But RTE’s days of relying on public support are, very clearly, numbered.