PB February-March 2026
February-March 2026 67
By Gerard Cunningham
Signal lost: re-establishing
the State broadcaster
RTÉ needs security so it can do the stuff
other broadcasters can’t but it should
modernise including by focusing on its
player, social platforms, podcasts, video,
and archives; and leveraging trust
I
t’s not a good time to be a public
broadcaster. In the US, the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has
thrown in the towel, after budget
cutbacks demanded by Donald Trump
made its future untenable. Yes, he fired Big
Bird.
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and
National Public Radio (NPR), the television and
radio networks the CPB helped fund, also face
increased pressure from declining corporate
sponsorships, struggling to make up the
shortfall from philanthropic institutions and
private donations.
Meanwhile in the UK, the BBC has endured
a generation of cutbacks since the financial
crisis in 2008, with continuing job cuts in
newsrooms, licence fee freezes, and talk of
more channels moving online only. A recent
green paper even raised the heretical options
of advertising and subscription funding. A
levy for radio, or Netflix. Its outgoing Director
General Tim Davie told the Guardian on 26
January that, without a funding overhaul, it
risked “profound jeopardy”.
At home, RTÉ has been given a stipulation
by media minister Patrick O’Donovan, that it
will not receive ring-fenced funding after 2027.
Instead, the government wants the national
broadcaster to increase commercial revenues.
This seems to miss the point of a public
service broadcaster’s role in society. It doesn’t
exist to compete for profits with Netflix or
Sky TV, but to provide a counterweight:
covering those societal needs which private
broadcasters regard as unprofitable.
Across Europe, national broadcasters have
been shifting away from licence-fee funding for
the last 25 years. Denmark, the country closest
to Ireland in population and size, abolished its
media licence in 2022, and is now funded from
general taxation.
Licences have also been replaced with
general exchequer funding in Belgium,
Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, France, Malta,
Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia,
and Sweden. The exact mechanism to replace
licence fees varies. In some countries, it is a
grant paid out of central taxation.. Surcharges
to electricity bills, excise tax, and advertising
top-ups are also in use. In Iceland, the licence
was replaced with a poll tax in 2007. Ireland
proposed something similar labelled a “screen
tax”, during the FG/Labour coalition, but the
idea was postponed and eventually drooped
after the water-charges protests made any
further household taxes a non-runner
Whatever the mechanics, RTÉ does need
secure funding. A minister who talks instead
about reducing headcounts and threatens
a 2027 cut-o unless the broadcaster
‘modernises’ is not creating a climate where
producers can plan ahead.
Despite this, Ireland, like the UK, still clings
to an increasingly dated licencing system,
though the UK is even more anachronistic, still
distinguishing between colour and black-and-
white televisions.
In an increasingly fractured media landscape,
where even social-media audiences are
fragmenting, public broadcasting oers one
of the few ways to present a shared reality to
the population. With disinformation becoming
an everyday hazard, that role is critical. This is
an area where Ireland would do well to steer
closer to Berlin than to Boston — or to Britain.
But RTÉ needs to modernise
To begin with, and to seriously tackle the
competition from streamers, Donnybrook
needs to fix the RTÉ Player. The joke is that
it plays the pre-roll commercials flawlessly
before strategically freezing, ultimately
facilitating another round of ads. The app is
a byword for bad design: regularly crashing
and leaving viewers frustrated. The audience
watching on time-delay on the app is not
competing with the scheduled programme,
but complementing it.
Another simple innovation would be to set
up its own social-media system. This column
has advocated before for RTÉ to maintain its
own server, for instance on Mastodon, rather
than depending on the grace and algorithms
of social-media corporations. At time of
writing, the EU Commission has just launched
an investigation into Elon Musk’s Grok, for
propagating sexualised photos of minors — if
ever there was a right time to slip the leash, it
is now.
And when it comes to established online
distribution, broadcasters control the growth
areas. Podcasting is becoming a mature
technology, and repurposing live radio into
podcast packages would seem an obvious
path for radio updates.
Video is a little more complicated, not least
because television works in landscape mode,
while the most popular online video channels
prefer portrait mode. But that should not be an
insurmountable barrier. If a reporter can record
separate reports for radio news and for early
and main evening-news programmes, then a
Tik-Tok style report should also be possible.
The opportunities of its established status
and relative trust are multiple: there are
underexploited opportunities for partnerships
with worthy institutions like colleges, libraries
and galleries; RTÉ’ is best placed to engage
Ireland’s diaspora and international markets
for Irish culture and even language; RTÉ’s
could do more with its unrivalled broadcast
archive.
All that of course will require funding. More
than that, it requires a commitment to the
future of RTÉ as something more than a clearing
house to transfer public funds to private
production companies, while diminishing
news production and public trust.
If we sit back unwisely we may tumble down
the same rabbit holes of disinformation and
slop that are ruining the UK and US.
MEDIA
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