RTÉ warns more funding cuts will hurt programming

ANY CUTS in public funding to RTÉ will directly impact the quality of programming, its managing director of radio has warned.

Clare Duignan said RTÉ had suffered “multiple impacts” financially over the last two years.

There had been a decline of 29 per cent in commercial revenue last year, the Sound and Vision fund was now taking 7 per cent of RTÉs licence fee revenue and RTÉ had set aside €70 million to fund the digital terrestrial television (DTT) network.

“We have now cut as much as we can without impact on quality. Cut any deeper and there can only be one outcome at the end of the day. Any further erosion of public funding would be very damaging to RTÉ’s output,” she told a media conference at the Cleraun University Centre in Dublin. The centre is run by Opus Dei.

Though no cut in the licence fee have been mooted, RTÉ is concerned that the Government may decide to cut back on the €55 million it spends paying the cost of the licence fee for pensioners.

RTÉ also fears that it may have to increase the €10 million it spends subventing TG4 every year.

Ms Duignan spoke on the theme of radio and the arts. She told the conference that RTÉ had carried out a representative survey of 1,500 people earlier this year to ascertain the level of interest in the arts on the radio.

She said 73 per cent of people engaged in listening to some form of the arts on radio. Book, film and music reviews were the most popular arts items.

“These results speak for a certain truth that the appetite for programmes that provide a deeper experience is growing,” she said.

Dublin Institute of Technology journalism lecturer Kate Shanahan said the 24-hour news cycle was affecting the Government’s ability to communicate its message, according to those who deal with the media.

She queried why the Government was so poor at communicating its message despite having so many press officers.

Ms Shanahan said the deputy Government press officer John Downing had compared dealing with the media to “feeding the beast”.

She recalled Mr Downing saying that there were now so many media outlets and so many stories breaking at any one time that they were rushing to keep up with all of it.

Ms Shanahan said Twitter had “changed everything” but the speed at which stories are disseminated nowadays meant that context and nuance “often goes out the window”.

The Irish Timeslegal affairs editor Carol Coulter told the conference the decision by the Garda to shield Jean Treacy, a key witness in the recent Eamonn Lillis murder trial, was "unjustifiable" and could interfere with the administration of justice.

She said shielding witnesses from the public could be used in future cases as a possible bargaining chip between those investigating the crime and witnesses.

Pulitzer prize-winning New York Timesinvestigator reporter Don Van Natta said the newspaper's interest in the News of the Worldbugging scandal was simply because it was a "fantastic story". The paper was accused of using the story to attack Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of the rival Wall Street Journal.