RTE deserves to be granted independence

The result of all of this is a deep public resentment of the licence fee itself. The reason the Government is getting away with the emasculation of RTÉ is that the public on the whole sees the licence fee simply as another form of tax. Radio ads threatening people with prosecution if they don't pay up may be a legitimate way of trying to raise desperately needed revenue, but they reinforce this mentality with brutal effectiveness. People feel sore about being forced to pay a fee for a service that a

I haven't seen the figures yet, but it's a pretty safe bet that the vast majority of us were parked in front of a television on Saturday morning, watching Ireland play Cameroon. Or rather, not just in front of a television, but in front of RTÉ.

The British channels may have offered a slightly slicker package, assembled with vastly greater financial resources, but RTÉ has always made up for its relative poverty with the intelligence of its analysis. And even if didn't, the chances are that most of us would want to watch such an event on RTÉ anyway. When a national psychodrama is being played out, we want to watch it with our own.

There is, though, a genuine possibility that this is the last World Cup we'll see on RTÉ. The national broadcaster is facing, as the chairman of the RTÉ Authority puts it, "extinction". And what a legacy that would be. After the richest years in our history, and after years of unbroken rule by the Republican Party, we are facing the real threat of having a broadcasting system entirely dominated by foreign-owned multinational conglomerates.

This would represent the most serious act of deliberate cultural impoverishment engineered here since British policy contributed to the near-demise of the Irish language. If it happens, the death of RTÉ will not be entirely due to the petty-minded spite of a Government that deeply detests any kind of independent scrutiny. It is a pincer movement.

On the one side, RTÉ is in the grip of a financing system that puts it at the mercy of whoever holds government office. The Government sets the licence fee, and is therefore in a position to reward sycophancy and punish temerity. Even if RTÉ was currently flush with money, this would be a bad system. Imagine what The Irish Times would be like if the Government (a term that is now virtually synonymous with Fianna Fáil) decided its cover price.

On the other hand, however, RTÉ cannot function as a genuine public service broadcaster because it also depends on advertising. The meaning of public service broadcasting is endlessly debated, but a key part of it is very simple. It is that it views members of the audience as citizens with needs and interests rather than as consumers with spending power.

A 68-year-old retired woman in rural Mayo who buys a bagful of groceries once a week in the local shop is a citizen and is therefore just as important as a 25-year-old investment banker in Dublin who drives a BMW, lives in a cool apartment and spends a fortune on clothes, drink and convenience foods.

For any enterprise that depends on advertising, however, the woman in Mayo is of no consequence and the man in Dublin is a prize catch. When advertisers talk about key demographics, what they mean is that some people matter a lot more than others.

From their perspective, of course, they are absolutely right. There is no point spending a fortune on ads for tampons if the audience you're reaching is mostly made up of old bachelors.

When you apply this to broadcasting, however, what you get is a definition of the audience as consumers rather than citizens. Programmes that don't appeal to the key demographics are not worth making. And RTÉ is increasingly forced to think this way because it is increasingly dependent on advertising.

This creates a vicious circle. The licence fee is inadequate, so more and more of the station's revenue is derived from advertising.

Therefore, the programmes are designed to attract the audiences that the advertisers want to reach. Therefore the licence fee seems to be funding what could be paid for from ads anyway. Therefore it doesn't make sense to increase the licence fee.

Isn't it time, therefore, to ask the question that every established way of doing things should face from time to time: if this system didn't exist would anyone ever invent it? The system is now a pantomime horse with two back ends. It produces neither the independence of political control that a purely commercial operation enjoys nor the freedom to respond to its users as citizens that a genuinely public service ought to have.

It may be time to think outside the goggle-box and to ask whether a genuine public service might not best be achieved by embracing the market in an intelligent way. If RTÉ is genuinely indispensable - and I think, in spite of its faults, that it is - then the vast majority of its audience would be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee for its services. Why not trust the public enough to give it a choice? Scrap the licence fee, introduce a subscription system, limit the amount of advertising and let the Government subvent the subscriptions of those who can't afford to pay.