OPINION: RTE should make the Late Late Show redundant - they'd save a fortune

One day there will be a Reeling In The Years special on 2023 featuring RTE's implosion and we'll all be paying for the privilege of watching a replay of them squandering our licence fee money. The irony. 

The State broadcaster has had an annus horribilis to say the very least; the undignified exit of Director General Dee Forbes, the payments scandal over Ryan Tubridy and Renault, executives traipsing in and out of Leinster House. The pouring over of barter accounts and a rotten culture soured the public against the broadcaster. Judges even spoke out and refused to punish people in court for not paying their TV licence.

It was wild but Kevin Bakhurst was installed as a new leader like Mel Gibson's William Wallace character in Braveheart. While the resigning and retiring executives in Committee Room 1 of Leinster House thought, "We all end up dead, it's just a question of how and why," he had to plot the broadcaster's freedom from public and Government scrutiny. He's put down a marker in that regard by capping salaries for top earners at €250,000 and playing hardball with Ryan Tubridy when it came to the crunch of his possible return to RTE radio, but the battle is far from won.

This week we read that the station is effectively getting a Government bailout of €56 million, or 'interim funding' as the spin doctors would call it. Paint it with whatever brush you like; it's more taxpayers' money being sunk into a dysfunctional broadcaster. We hear 400 jobs will go at the station as it restructures, and that's all well and good, but the fear is over who those 400 workers will be.

The National Union of Journalists has said its "gravely concerned at the scale of the proposed redundancies" and is looking for "detailed information on how it is proposed to maintain core services and the impact on staff of such drastic proposals." 

The fear is that staff providing most of the actual public service by RTE, that being investigative and public interest journalism, will get the heave while top stars, albeit taking a pay cut to the new maximum of €250,000 a year, will be kept on. This cannot be allowed to happen in a State broadcaster already struggling to keep up local services.

Our reporter spoke to former RTE Midlands Correspondent Ciaran Mullooly at the National Ploughing Championships in September and he spoke a lot of sense and shone a light on just some of the issues in Donnybrook.

He said: "I do not think the television licence fee should be funding the Late Late Show or a lot of our drama and entertainment shows. That should come from commercial income."

He went on to say that the payments scandal this year came at a time "RTE's facilities around the country are understaffed", pointing out, "we don't have a camera person in the Athlone regional studio or the Dundalk studio." He said the studio in Athlone has been downgraded and "doesn't even have a television camera in there."

"That's why people like me get annoyed when we hear that money is being spent on other things," he added.

This is from a man who was inside RTE and delivered important news to viewers as Midlands Correspondent. He's seen the belly of the beast and is saying RTE needs to be split in half. There should be a current affairs side of the house that we fund through the TV licence in whatever guise that ends up being, and an entertainment side that is fully funded by commercial means. 

Take Ciaran Mullooly's comments against the backdrop of what we now know has been going on in RTE for years with money spent on bringing commercial clients to Champions League finals and the likes, as well as the money still being spent on stars and their entertainment shows, like the Late Late, the 2 Johnnies or Dancing With The Stars. The Late Late has failed to hit the heights of previous years and is regularly rolling out faces we see on other RTE shows. Filling the sofa from the RTE canteen is a running joke among viewers but it's not far off this year. Start by making the Late Late Show redundant and you'll save a fortune.

No one's TV licence fee should be paying for last week's Late Late, for example. Is Alistair Campbell playing the bagpipes a public service broadcast? That said, it's not entertainment either so he falls between two stools. 

The Late Late is just one example of an entertainment show that shouldn't be aired unless fully funded by commercial money. Dancing With The Stars is another. That's basically a post-Christmas party for half of the station's already overpaid 'stars,' both the ones dancing and hosting. Why is public money being invested in these shows while they can't get an extra camera in a studio in the Midlands trying to cover news people actually care about. Those on-the-ground staff are RTE workers I'd gladly pay a revamped TV licence for.

Ciaran Mullooly's split solution is a simple and elegant one and sounds similar to changes Kevin Bakhurst is planning at the broadcaster. We need to see his strategy in action for a few months before making any judgement. There is much talk about the changed media landscape and how the TV licence is not fit for purposes. We also had local and regional newspaper titles make a case to the Oireachtas recently about a new funding model, and it's so very badly needed.

The TV licence should be revamped to a public service media charge and should help to fund RTE to cover sports and current affairs, but also help TG4, local radio stations, newspapers and their websites. Journalists and broadcasters in those sectors are genuinely providing a service for people around the country. People can read and watch discussions on real issues and if that ever goes to the wall, where will we all stand? Where will we consume the news from our local council meetings or from farmers standing in their field that's been flooded for the tenth time this year? 

We'll be left with a vacuum filled with misinformation and drivel filtering out largely unchecked on social media platforms. Democracies need bastions of truth that people can rely on and local media and public service media like that described must play that role. It's a very wide conversation and maybe the RTE disaster of 2023 was the catalyst we needed to have that wider discussion before it's too late.

If we ever get to the point of little to no public service journalism in our communities, and RTE is still making gameshows with us paying the bill, we've failed the entire media sector and the public as a result.