Bob Collins talks to Emmet Oliver about the highs and lows in 29 years at the State broadcaster.

After 29 years (including seven as director-general) in RTÉ, Bob Collins leaves behind two organisations, or at least two versions of the one organisation.

If you talk to one group of observers, many of them in the commercial sector, the RTÉ he leaves behind will not exist a decade from now. The days of large-scale public service broadcasters employing thousands of people are over, they predict.

RTÉ is living on a combination of borrowed time and diminishing resources and it has no place in the world of niche broadcasters likely to proliferate in the digital age.

If you believe this version, RTÉ's coup in getting a licence fee increase last Christmas was simply a stay of execution and eventually the public, and certainly the Government, will tire of this ambiguous concept known as public service broadcasting.

The other version of RTÉ is a streamlined organisation which has emerged from the painful re-structuring process of recent years with vigour. The RTÉ of lower numbers and better programmes.

The RTÉ that gave us the Special Olympics and hard-hitting programmes on clerical child abuse. The RTÉ that in its statement of commitments has promised the audience more Irish programming, more drama, more news/current affairs and all for €150 a year.

Mr Collins firmly believes the second version is the one he will see in his rear mirror as he drives away this evening and hands over the DG's job to Cathal Goan.

"I think this is an organisation which is far more aware of the realities than perhaps it was six or seven years ago. I think that internal change, that changing of the balance in how the organisation saw itself, together with the stabilisation of the public funding arrangement for the future, that has all been significantly worthwhile," he says.

Asked what he will do now, he answers: "I am going to do nothing for three or four months. I have no plans whatsoever. I honestly have no plans. I don't see myself in a private broadcaster for instance," he says.

While he says Celebrity Farm is not to his tastes, he says RTÉ's output is not meant to be moulded to his tastes.

"More than half a million people viewed that programme on a consistent basis. In the end of the day it was just a television programme. I don't know why it warranted the intensity of the reaction it obtained. It was taken far too seriously," he says.

What is being taken seriously in Government circles is RTÉ's financial outturn for the year. Mr Collins is not concerned, however: "I think it's going to be a surplus. At or very close to €3 million. Clearly, even with two and half months to go you can't predict precisely how much you are going to earn. And the €3 million is based on the assumption that An Post will deliver the target amount in the licence fee.There are pressures for next year because advertising revenue is down. There are elements that have enabled us to achieve the surplus in the current year which will not be there next year. That will provide challenges for Cathal Goan," he says.

"But in 2003 that is what we said we would do. Our expenditure is under budget in the current year. We are honouring our commitments outlined in the statement of commitments."

Getting anywhere near a surplus has been an uphill struggle for Mr Collins and his team. Much of the energy has been spent trying to persuade officials in the Department of Communications to give the green light for a licence fee rise.

"It turned out to be a more turbulent period than I imagined. But I knew this was going to be a period of change, right from the beginning. When I was setting out my stall I knew the key thing facing RTÉ was to transform itself and change itself".

He says 600 people left RTÉ during the last few years without a single day lost due to industrial action. Arguably a similar triumph was persuading the Minister for Communications, Mr Ahern, to increase the licence fee just before Christmas.

"I think that one of the most significant things that the organisation has achieved has been the laying down of a proper foundation for the public funding. It could always be more, but it was set at a level that was realistic. We now have a process for indexation and that can't be unravelled," he says.

Mr Collins rejects the accusation that politicians will always be stingy about the licence fee and are more at home bossing RTÉ management around.

"No Minister, no politician, no representative of a Minister has ever telephoned me while I was director general of RTÉ or while I was director of television programmes and that covers a period of 14 years. Nobody has ever telephoned me about an editorial matter. Of course, people have criticised us after the event or people may have phoned me and said that was an outrageous thing that programme did. That's fair. I have no difficulty with anybody expressing a view about a programme we have transmitted. But as far as contacting me, it never happened. It is the gospel truth. No Minister ever made a political representation or editorial representation to me."

As for the future, the challenges are considerable, but not insurmountable for RTÉ, he says.

"There is a convocation role for public broadcasting. It's not always easy to give effect to it. Not everybody will gather around the fireside and watch television like they did in the 1960s. But there is no point in expecting people to behave as they may have in the 1960s because that is whistling in the dark."

The biggest challenge - at least on the television side - comes from digital.

"I think as competition grows the greater is the requirement to have the kind of service that a public service broadcaster should provide. There is a real challenge for public broadcasters in holding their nerve," he says.

But surely niche TV stations represent the future, not generalist services? "Well how many titles do Easons carry? Its probably four of five thousand in terms of periodicals and magazines. Every one of those represents some degree of competition. Its the salami slice principle. But the biggest pile is still going to be The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Examiner. Papers which have an Irish reference and seek to provide a broad sweep".

But as he departs, Mr Collins delivers a blunt warning: "Ownership is important. And the fact that RTÉ is owned by the people and not owned by some amalgam of conglomerates from abroad. That is important. Because ownership is not neutral".

He claims Ireland is in danger of being "swamped" or "submerged" by an Anglo-American media onslaught driven by large conglomerates. "We have to make sure we don't lose a sense of ourselves". He says maybe we need another Douglas Hyde to de-anglicise and de-Americanise us.

Asked whether the digital era, which is being pioneered in many ways by Sky, will test RTÉ to its limits he pulls no punches. "We can't live in isolation. We can't pull down the blinds. We have to give people a choice and they will naturally take that choice. But we must also retain the capacity to make programmes about ourselves."