There were a series of staggering revelations, once again, from the latest round of RTÉ hearings before the Oireachtas public accounts committee (PAC) yesterday morning and afternoon. At one stage, when RTÉ was asked how long it would take to review the status of the 700 RTÉ employees who had once been victims of so-called bogus self-employment, RTÉ’s response to the committee was that it would take fifteen years. Yes, you read that correctly: Fifteen years to review 700 employee files.
But the bigger story, beyond the who-got-paid-what-and-when circus that has engulfed the broadcaster, is the simply staggering collapse in the public’s willingness to pay for it: Licence fee revenue, Kevin Bakhurst revealed, is down 39% year on year. And there is little to suggest that those figures won’t get worse before the end of the year, with three months of licence fee-renewal rounds still to be factored into the annual figures. And, it’s fair to say, the early months of next year are shaping up to be worse.
As such, the fire alarms are now blaring very openly:
The headline is that Kevin Bakhurst has said without a bailout of tens of millions of euro by next spring, RTÉ will be insolvent.
The broadcaster has €68 million on hand, the committee heard, but is burning through cash while licence fee income craters.
What is happening here, in effect, is that RTÉ is playing a game of chicken with the Government: Unless you bail us out, it is saying, the whole show will crash sometime early next year. In return, the Government is playing its own game of chicken with RTÉ: Unless you fundamentally reform, it is saying, we will let you go bankrupt.
The problem is, very simply, that nobody in RTÉ believes, in their heart of hearts, that the Government would ever let the broadcaster go bankrupt. So engrained is the notion in RTÉ of its own essential place in Irish society that many – if not all – who work there simply cannot conceive of an Irish Government permitting it to crash and burn. They are probably, though by no means certainly, right.
For one thing, it might well suit the Government to let RTÉ go bankrupt before intervening. Intervening before it goes bankrupt would give politicians far less power over it than they would have if they were intervening with a rescue deal to save the jobs of the people who work in Montrose.
For another thing, the nature of human psychology is such that the prospect of losing one’s employment sometimes has to become very real before there’s any sense of a debt or obligation to the person who steps in and saves your job: RTÉ staff fully expect a bailout at this stage, and are not likely to be thankful for something that they see, for whatever reason, as their god-given right. But if wages suddenly stop being paid, and things look like falling apart, the resultant gratitude for a last-second intervention might well be appreciably grater.
Third, a bailout of RTÉ at this stage is simply likely to be much less popular than a bailout after the thing has gone belly up. At this point, while revelations about bumper pay packets are still coming out, the public are much more likely to want to see RTÉ suffer than they are to want to see it saved. It is likely that public sentiment – if it switches at all – will only switch when someone turns on Fair City in the spring only to be met with a title card saying “channel off air”. Then, if there’s an outcry, the Government can be seen to act by the public, as well as by RTÉ.
So were I an RTÉ staffer, I would not be quite as confident that the state will step in to keep things as they mostly are as some of them appear to be. Further, there’s another risk: What if RTÉ was to go belly up, and the public reaction was simply to shrug and switch the channel to Virgin Media, or – worse again – the BBC? In such circumstances, the Government might feel obliged to save very little, outside of the news and current affairs departments. Indeed, the nature of the media is that RTÉ can expect very little sympathy to be aired for it on competing broadcasters. Newstalk and Virgin will not be filling their airwaves with abuse at the Government for a failure to intervene and protect their biggest competition. Both broadcasters, after all, would dramatically expand their markets in an environment without an RTÉ.
So keep an eye on this story. RTÉ’s coming insolvency provides Government with a significant opportunity to twist the knife in the broadcaster’s back. They would be foolish not to take it