Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ has grappled with the same dilemma since the 1960s

So often in Ireland, things come to a head and then just slip away again. So it was in the late 1960s when it seemed that fundamental choices would have to be made about what RTÉ was for. Will it be so again now?

Back then, RTÉ's identity crisis began when its governing authority refused to reappoint the TV station’s innovative and inventive controller of programmes, Gunnar Rugheimer. Rugheimer, a Swede, had joined Telefís Éireann (as it then was) in 1963 and was a crucial figure in building the station almost from scratch, and especially in establishing a robustly independent current affairs division.

But Fianna Fáil didn’t much like him. According to Turlough O’Riordan’s entry on Rugheimer in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, Seán Lemass and Charles Haughey “disdained Rugheimer’s push to accommodate independent voices and introduce a culture of stronger interrogation into current affairs broadcasting”. There was also much muttering about his alleged lack of commitment to Irish-language programming, “tinged with an element of disdain for his ‘non-national’ status”.

In 1969, three years after he was ousted, Rugheimer wrote an article for The Irish Times that summed up the unique difficulties of public service broadcasting in Ireland. “The Irish television service”, he wrote “functions under a set of contradictory conditions which are apt to make the work of creative people more difficult than similar activity in other countries.”

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He highlighted two of these conditions. One was the existence of intense competition from UK channels, which meant that RTÉ had to fill more airtime that it could properly manage, and thus imported vast quantities of what he called “programming fare which is often trivial and sometimes tawdry. It fills the stomach but its nutrition value is doubtful.”

The other was a vast overdependence on advertising revenue: “What makes the RTÉ situation doubly serious is that there is no other European broadcasting service with a system based on combined revenue from licence fee and advertising where the proportion of advertising income is as great as in Ireland.”

Lelia Doolan, Bob Quinn and Jack Dowling pointed to ‘the inadequacy of the station’s view of its cultural function’

Rugheimer posed the question of whether this was what Irish people actually wanted from their broadcaster: “My years in Ireland have taught me one thing – the Irish national broadcasting service was not conceived to become a national jukebox.”

Rugheimer’s article was part of what was then a raging national debate about this very question, prompted by the resignation of three of RTÉ's most talented TV producers and their publication of a 400-page critique of the direction the station had taken, Sit Down and Be Counted.

Lelia Doolan, Bob Quinn and Jack Dowling pointed to “the inadequacy of the station’s view of its cultural function” and to the ways in which dependence on ad revenue distorted its whole sense of purpose. They argued that it was simply not possible for a broadcaster to function simultaneously as a lure for consumers and a forum for citizens.

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They showed how quickly those who were involved in setting up the TV station realised this. Ed Roth, the first director general, had concluded that “The dilemma of Irish television is that it combines two objectives; one to establish and maintain a service which will further national culture and aims and have regard to the prestige of the nation and secondly that the service must be a paying enterprise.”

Doolan, Quinn and Dowling did seem to have created a genuinely national debate. Public meetings they addressed were packed and went on for hours of passionate contributions. Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show had the trio on for a full hour in which they argued about the future of the station with controller of programmes Michael Garvey and assistant controller Jack White.

The Irish Times’s TV critic Ken Gray expressed the hope that the sacrifice the trio had made in giving up their jobs, and their success in stoking this national debate, might lead to “a radical alteration in the whole structure and outlook of broadcasting in Ireland”.

All the contradictions that were so obvious to the people who developed RTÉ in the 1960s simply continued. The station’s job was not to resolve them but to work around them

Some hope. The only thing that really happened was that, a few months after Sit Down and Be Counted was published, the Fianna Fáil government launched a bizarre witch-hunt against an RTÉ current affairs investigation into the operations of money lenders who were fleecing poor people in Dublin. This included a tribunal of inquiry – not into the money lenders but into the programme makers. The message to RTÉ was clear: never mind Sit Down and Be Counted, just sit down and shut up.

And so all the contradictions that were so obvious to the people who developed RTÉ in the 1960s simply continued. The station’s job was not to resolve them but to work around them.

Over the last decade, with the huge shifts in media technology and revenue models, the contradictions have become ever more obviously unsustainable. Yet RTÉ has essentially continued to do the two things that Rugheimer pointed to in 1969: fill its stomach with the cheap calories of junk programmes bought in from abroad, and hope that if it pays its stars enough they will deliver advertising revenue. And its often excellent programme makers have continued to slalom around those obstacles.

But the contradictions can no longer be managed. There is a choice to be made: national jukebox or national broadcaster.