St Paul famously wrote in his letter to the Romans that he does not understand his own actions, and not to be glib about Scripture, but listening to RTÉ radio most mornings, I cannot but come to the same conclusion about how I choose to start my days.
Never is that more the case than when they run the truly awful TV licence advertisement, of which there are a few iterations, but always ending with the same line: “You don’t have to love it, but you do have to pay it. It’s the law.”
Up to that last pair of sentences, the advertisement is designed to have a light, breezy and humorous feel about it, which drops off like a cliff edge with the line, “but you do have to pay it. It’s the law”.
No more messing about, people of Ireland, it’s time to pay the piper, is very much the message it sends.
There’s a lot I don’t like about the advertisement, and my perception of it is perhaps coloured entirely by what it’s for. Nevertheless, it all comes together to represent, to this writer’s mind, the worst of the Irish State. Glossing over the poor (public) service, the condescension, and ultimately, the compulsion.
Nevermind the fact that the advertisements evidently don’t work, with numbers still in shaky territory in the wake of the RTÉ payment scandal. Some of the most recent reporting on the matter (the Examiner) detailed that licence fee revenue was down €58 million in the last two years, the fee bringing in €247 million or so between July 2023 and June 2025.
This is to be compared to the €306 million brought in between July 2021 and June 2023.
That’s, obviously, as a result of the number of people coughing up for the fee falling, a decline precipitated by the aforementioned wave of scandals that have shaken RTÉ in recent years. The 2021-2023 period referenced above saw 1.7m people renew the licence, and 243,179 first-time purchases. Around 1.5 million people paid the fee between 2023 and 2025, a decrease of over 360,000 people or so.
According to data provided by Minister Patrick O’Donovan last month, in response to a parliamentary question from Ken O’Flynn TD, 2023 (the latest year for which data is available), saw the highest TV licence fee evasion rate since 2019, with almost 17 percent of those eligible to pay it opting not to, resulting in foregone revenue of €43.5 million that year.
They’re figures that are likely to keep falling, considering convictions for non-payment of the TV licence are falling alongside the number of people actually paying it.
I suppose the threats of a €1,000 fine or a stay in prison are blunted by the dual facts that, 1) you’re increasingly unlikely to be convicted for it and so, practically speaking, it’s money in your pocket if you don’t, and 2) it’s unlikely prisons are going to take on TV licence offenders as they consider releasing medium- to high-risk offenders in the face of major overcrowding.
Far be it from me to make the case for not paying the licence fee, but the facts must be laid out to reveal the clear desperation behind the ongoing ad campaign on the broadcaster the licence fee is largely there to support. Not so much a ‘public service broadcaster’ as a public broadcaster requiring increasing levels of public servicing.
But if truth be told, the fear-over-fondness approach is one that’s long been taken with the TV licence. Only one old advertisement that I could find online went against the grain and tried to drum up support for the TV licence based on the merits of RTÉ. The rest, with varying levels of humour, have emphasised that if you have a TV in your house, it’s the law that the licence fee must be paid.
Or else.
Which says an awful lot about the esteem that the much-vaunted State broadcaster is held in, or the State perception of the esteem that the broadcaster is held in. Or both. Either way, I don’t expect this latest advertisement, which has been droning on for some months now alongside almost exclusively State-funded advertisements on RTÉ, to do too much to convince TV licence holdouts to fork out the mandated €160.
If anything, it might be just the push a disgruntled listener needs to decide that far from loving it, they’re no longer going to pay for it, either.