Forum went beyond its remit

RÓNÁN MULLEN is to be congratulated on his excellent article on the report of the Forum on Broadcasting and in particular his reporting of the fact that the Forum went beyond its original remit when it commented on the adequacy of the licence fee (The Irish Examiner, August 4).

Regarding this matter, it should be pointed out that this error by the Forum was most surprising given that no proper financial evaluation was undertaken by the Forum of RTÉ’s current financial situation. If it did so, it may very likely have found that the difficulty with RTÉ is not so much the level of the licence fee, but the fact that RTÉ is a chronically inefficient organisation, which two recent reports have also discovered.

Furthermore, RTÉ’s demand for a fee hike is based on the premise that the losses incurred in the last three years cannot be sustained indefinitely.

But in making this point, RTÉ have conveniently forgotten (and indeed did not remind the Forum) that the losses incurred by RTÉ in the past two years are predominately restructuring costs and once off items. But the fault must be laid squarely at the Forum in this regard, who clearly went beyond their remit and failed to investigate their information. It is this shallow examination of the issues in Irish broadcasting that typifies what Mr Mullen correctly describes as this “philosophically bankrupt report”.

Mairtín Ó Maolruaidh,

Polkeen,

Tuam Road,

Galway.