Madam, – I would hazard an educated guess that I’m not the only one to find those radio ads about paying your TV licence incredibly irritating and patronising.
You know the one that finishes by announcing dictatorially that TV licence inspectors “have heard all the excuses and none of them work”? The message is: be good children, don’t question or prevaricate. Just pay the licence fee for our wondrous “national broadcaster” and continue compliantly to bankroll RTÉ’s collection of has-beens and never-weres.
To be frank, RTÉ could be removed forever from my selection of TV channels and I’d be just as happy. But there is no choice in the matter. This is dictatorship. Pure and simple.
All of this is made especially blood-boiling by the breathtaking hard neck being displayed by RTÉ’s Gerry Ryan in refusing to take a cut in his grossly inflated salary, which amounts to a ridiculous €558,000 for emitting the verbal equivalent of the matter excreted by adult male bovines.
I have news for Mr Ryan and any other reluctant travellers in RTÉ. We’re paying your ludicrous salaries and being talked down to as a side order. So in these straitened times what’s on the menu should be both simple and penitential: a pay cut, a reasonably generous one – which, when the rest of us on average wages are facing salary reductions or no salary at all, reflects the reality of life on planet Earth.
If they find this unpalatable, then, they can swallow instead an imposed colossal reduction. The latter course was advocated recently by Vincent Browne, when he correctly pointed out that Ryan and Co would have nowhere else to go in the present economic climate.
Now that would be an improvement. – Yours, etc,