It was somewhat ironic this week to witness the Irish people getting a stern lecture from the Minister for Finance about how the television licence, and the public’s obligation to pay it, is “the law of the land”. This assertion came in the same week as independent TD Michael McNamara quite reasonably pointed out that it is also the law of the land that people arriving into Irish ports and airports should present a passport, and that the willful destruction of such a document is a crime. How many prosecutions, McNamara wondered, have there been in recent years for the breaking of that particular “law of the land”?
You know the answer, dear reader, as do I. And as does the Minister for Finance.
The assertion that we must all pay the television licence, or else, also came in a week where the broadsheet headlines were once again dominated by financial malpractice at RTÉ – this time in relation to the ongoing farce that is the management of the Late Late Toy Show musical.
Most notably, though, it came a few days after the Sunday Business Post’s weekend story that the Government had considered replacing the television licence with a €15 per month tax on broadband, to be paid by every person in the state with an internet connection. That proposal, it swiftly transpired, was about as popular as encountering a funeral convoy on the road to Dublin is on the Mayo team bus.
As I wrote on Monday, the Government are in a major pickle when it comes to RTÉ: On the one hand, the television licence is a completely failing mechanism for raising money for the national broadcaster, because a critical mass of Irish people have now arrived at an obvious and inescapable conclusion: They can’t prosecute us all. Non-compliance, either as a form of peaceful protest (in my case) or perhaps as a simple act of opportunistic freeloading, is on the rise. There is nothing that suggests that this trend will reverse itself.
On the other hand, the Government has no politically viable options to replace the television licence. There are exactly two ways this could be done, and neither of them are runners: First, they could simply abolish the licence fee and fund RTÉ out of general taxation. This would involve diverting hundreds of millions of euros away from health and housing and using it to fund RTÉ. As a secondary consideration, this arrangement would also compromise the pretence that RTÉ is independent of the Government, since the broadcaster would become literally dependent on the generosity of the Government every year for its survival. It wouldn’t be very long until news reports that upset somebody in People before Profit resulted in impassioned speeches in the Dáil about the need to bring RTÉ to heel through the budget.
Second, they could go down the alternative funding road, and hand over to RTÉ the right to tax us all for our broadband, or for owning an IPad or laptop, or for having a Netflix subscription. This would be deeply, deeply unpopular, and not only with the public: Netflix executives in California, or broadband operators here at home, might just resent being asked to become tax collectors for Montrose. People who prefer Netflix on a Friday night to Patrick Kielty might just resent being asked to pay for the dreck they’ve just switched away from, as well.
And there’s an election coming up.
That’s the reason why the Government is sticking with the television licence: They’ve calculated that even if the licence fee continues to struggle to bring in revenue this year, RTÉ can probably just about manage. And by the time the next funding crisis arises, well, the election will be in the rear view mirror, and it might be somebody else’s problem.
The difficulty for RTÉ is that while this might suit the Government, it is terrible news for Montrose. RTÉ’s position is not getting stronger by the day – it is getting weaker. As the days, weeks, and months pass, the population of people who watch RTÉ almost exclusively is shrinking. The population of people who use alternatives is growing. The appetite for funding RTÉ amongst the public is unlikely to strengthen over the course of the next year – especially if the Government resorts to a campaign of TV licence prosecutions to try and force the public to heel.
Ultimately, these political problems are intractable. At some point in the future, a Government is going to have to decide whether RTÉ has a future in its current form at all, and whether it is worth bringing great unpopularity onto its own head, just to keep the residents of Montrose in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
The longer that day is postponed, the more likely it is that RTÉ’s days, ultimately are numbered.
And to think – some of you say I never write with sufficient optimism.