RTÉ does not have 'adequate revenues' to deliver public service remit

Dee Forbes: Over a quarter of households now don’t pay their TV licence at all, RTÉ's director general will tell the PAC. File picture: Maxwells

RTÉ does not have “adequate revenues” to deliver against its public service remit, while “persistent” Government failures have led to lost jobs in the broadcast sector, a Dáil committee will hear today.

The State broadcaster, which has been dealing with financial issues for many years, will tell the Public Accounts Committee this afternoon that it is losing €50m each year on the television licence due to evasion and the increase in ineligible homes.

RTÉ director general Dee Forbes is expected to describe that lost revenue as representing the annual cost of programming on all RTÉ’s radio stations and orchestras, and as being more than double what it spends on TV drama each year.

Ms Forbes will state that a broadcasting licence should be a “universal fee”, to which all households “contribute and benefit”.

“Over a quarter of households now don’t pay at all,” Ms Forbes will say. 

She is expected to describe the television licence as “by some distance the utmost unreformed part of the public media in Ireland”.

Ms Forbes’ opening statement is expected to make reference to TV licence evasion levels of over 15% of homes in 2020, and ineligible (ie, no television) homes levels of 13% in the same year.

“Fixing this is the responsibility of Government,” Ms Forbes will say. “Persistent failures to do so have already cost jobs, both within RTÉ and the broader audio-visual sector, and hundreds of hours of journalism, creative, and cultural programming.” 

She will say that further “inaction” will mean a decline in “RTÉ’s relevance, financial sustainability, and the level of services it can provide”.

Ms Forbes is expected to say that investigative broadcast journalism and news, election, and political coverage are not “sustainable on any scale in this country without a strong and viable RTÉ”.

Despite the broadcaster’s travails, Ms Forbes is expected to make reference to RTÉ having “extended its public value with market-leading online and mobile media services, offering all of RTÉ’s journalism and programming on the smartphone, tablet, and desktop”.