Government TDs and senators tripped over themselves on Wednesday to praise RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst for leading the organisation’s charge to trim costs and “restore trust and confidence” after the scandal that rocked the broadcaster two and a half years ago. They should be careful what they wish for.
On Wednesday morning, a group of academics published an open letter through Dublin City University’s Institute for Media, Democracy and Society in Dublin, warning against “short-term” thinking in the drive for efficiency at RTÉ. “The central question for the Government,” they wrote, “should be how RTÉ intends to fulfil its public service mandate in the digital era, not how far it can reduce its costs.”
That mandate is of the utmost importance at a time of “data-harvesting” by buccaneering digital platforms, many of them under the influence of a “small set of US-based tech oligarchs” with “open contempt” for democracy. “The digital age needs a strong model of public service to counter the rage-bait, invasive advertising, and AI slop that dominate so many online spaces.”
The trouble is, Irish politicians don’t really think about RTÉ, its role and its reliance on commercial revenues for funding in those terms. Instead, they tend to rely, as the academics noted, on the simpler bloated public sector versus agile private sector “trope”.
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With notable exceptions, including Labour Party TD Alan Kelly and the Social Democrats’ Sinead Gibney, committee members failed to press Bakhurst and his management team on what will be left of RTÉ after all these cuts. Increasingly, the answer to that question seems to be something like a clearing-house for public funds to commercial – or, as they prefer, independent – production companies with plans afoot to outsource everything except news, current affairs and sport.
But even the news is no longer safe from job cuts, it seems. “No one is immune from downsizing in RTÉ,” Bakhurst said, after indicating “we will have to look at news in the years to come”. Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan will be delighted, no doubt. He told the News at One on Wednesday that RTÉ was “clearly too big” and that some people might call Bakhurst’s cuts “hollowing out. I call it rationalisation”.
If that is the message Ireland’s political class has taken from the funding crisis at the national broadcaster, they have clearly,missed the point.
