Margaret Rossiter's Column - There's trouble in RTE

There is a theory that institutions should be seriously examined every few decades; they should be taken apart, shaken out of their comfort zone, to see how they are functioning. Are they doing what they have been established to do and how are they doing it? Are there internal struggles for power which inhibit adaptation and progress? Have special talents been encouraged or quashed because “that’s not the way we do it.”

The theory applies to all institutions, but particularly those of government which are funded by the public taxpayers. It applies, too, to industrial and commercial institutions, though there the annual audit, and the necessity to make a profit, also dictates the necessity for change and reform. But has anybody yet heard of major reform in State institutions?

Well, now, we have, as RTE is being shaken out of its old, well-established ways. We are hearing of salaries which seem grossly out of proportion to those in the private sector. And comparisons have inevitably been drawn. Inevitably too, one has to recall those Covid days when we were confined to our homes and totally dependent on the essential services which kept us fed; who nursed us when we were ill; the workers who stacked the food shelves; kept our water supplies functioning; delivered our post; the numerous ordinary people who did (and still do) work essential to the maintenance of our society. Their salaries and wages will never reach, in a working lifetime, the combined earnings that a celebrity in RTE earns (or gets) in one year. Indeed that would not be possible without causing such gross inflation that our economy would collapse.

We do, however, pay for celebrities, people who persuade us they can do things much better than the rest of us. And, it seems, we need celebrities and they have always been part of human history. As we crawled out of the caves, there must have been people who persuaded us that they knew more than the rest of humankind and were thus entitled to be rewarded for it. And the cult of modern celebrity is now on display in the current examination of the performance of our national broadcaster.

In reading brief reports of that examination, it is difficult for some of us not to indulge in a waspish gloat on emerging disclosures. It would seem that a know-all institution which was not slow in identifying the malfunctioning of other institutions, did not see the apparent inequalities in its own. For instance, its attitude to the Catholic Church. Listeners could not but observe its anti-Church climate, not in its news coverage, but in the not infrequent comments of some of its contributors. Of course, adverse criticism of the Church’s attitudes and cover-ups of the abuse of children were appallingly reprehensible, and merited exposure and comment and analysis and justice. And every decent practising Catholic would agree, but the enduring antipathy is imbalance.

The vast, vast majority of Catholic priests are good decent people, and do much good work, and the vast, vast majority of ordinary Catholics are good decent people. They deserve balance in reportage and comment in their national broadcasting media.

And balance is what we are promised in proposed reform, but first the functions of the national media needs to be redefined. What are the parameters? How will it be financed? If it is to be independent surely it should not be circumscribed by the necessity of having to engage in commercial funding, as RTE does at present? And are we, taxpayers, willing to take on the bill?

Also, of course, the question of celebrity salaries, and the wide difference between these and those at the coalface of broadcasting, needs to be reassessed. Looking at these challenges it is easy to see why national institutions ignore reform. It is far more comfortable to continue old easy, to do things in the same old way “as my father did them”.