Dee Forbes banging the RTE TV licence drum again 60m uncollected fee *poll not working - pl ignore*

Political suicide for whoever tries to implement this

I think most people want a national TV station ... and pay the licence/accept one has to pay for it like taxes have to be paid ... but this comes with a caveat ... how the TV station .... and radio too .... uses our money ....

I see all these 'stars' of TV & radio earning like 150K upwards ... with Pat Kenny earning 900K as famously reminded by this Dublinese Elvis lookalike back in 2009 (The Frontline: Pat Kenny comes under fire (youtube.com)) ... the Ryan Tubridy scandal brought about the mainstream realisation of the obscene money these greedy people feel entitled to .... sadly this greed did not end with Tubbers' exit from RTE ... his replacement still gets 150K for doing 5 hours a week talking the same rubbish ....

TV remains polluted with absolute smutty drivel like First Dates Ireland along with continuously flogged dead horses passed their prime like DWTS, Operation Transformation and Room to Improve ... meanwhile no Kin series 3 or no other such quality drama being made ... nice to know what RTE prioritise ...

Hasbeen comedians like Tommy Tiernan and Oliver Callan can thank their lucky stars for RTE .... always there to rescue them from their destiny ... at our cost ... yet the door is firmly closed to everyone else ...

If RTE want us to pay them money then we all need a say in how it is run and what type of programmes are on it .... the days of forcing handpicked individuals at us a la Noel Kelly needs to be gone but isn't .... programmes like The Frontline for Pat Kenny and Tubridy Tonight for its namesake were specially made for the presenter NOT the audience .... same goes for Operation Transformation ... believe it or not for Gerry Ryan ... can't see why though!! ...

Our worst TV programmes are cheap, easy to make drivel .... but where does all the money go? Why are shoestring programmes made? Why is RTE ... a company with licence money plus govt money plus ad revenue ... so broke? ... until these questions are answered and until these issues are resolved the people should not feel obliged to pay the licence ... I for one want Kin #3 .... others want other programmes ... I am not saying get rid of what is on currently but we need and do not get variety or quality .... and why are we not getting what we should be getting? salaries! salaries! salaries! ... and creating programmes for presenters rather than audiences! ....

So rather than sorting the problem child that is rte and reigning in their obscenely wasteful spending, they and the government are willing to attempt to take 10 euro a.month off people.to keep them in the style they have become accustomed to.

It's the unwillingness to admit that a large volume of people do not want to pay for something they have no interest in or even think that rte is worth supporting.

Instead they want any other business, to help gather the funds to keep them afloat.

Both rte and the government are really perong me off.

I don't have rte on my tv. I hear very little of their radio. At an absolute push, if I'm in the car on a Saturday afternoon I might hear a few minutes of movies and musicals program on lyric.

I pay broadband to Eir for internet. To watch Disney etc. not rte. Never.

A broadband tax would be very unfair.

AFAIK nearly all countries, ones comparable in size to Ireland anyway, fund pubic service broadcasting through some form of mandatory exaction on the taxpayer. If RTE funding moved to some form of voluntary subscription like you seem to be suggesting they would not be able to finance noncommercial content like documentaries, arts, Irish language on any serious scale.

well that's the subhead but

i still think the government could plump for direct exchequer funding as the least politically painful option, despite strong FF resistance.

Yes but if you went down that road a huge chunk of the population would choose not top pay, RTE's income would collapse, and they would have to take a scythe to arts programming, documentaries, etc.

Politicians don't often say this this out loud because they would effectively be accusing a big swathe of the electorate of being uncultured oiks who only want toi watch Cornoation Street and premiership football but that's the reality.

The article has a quote from Senator Shane Cassells (FF) saying "why in gods name would we eliminate €200million of an income stream and saddle the taxpayer with that? That is batshit crazy."

The Senator doesn't opt for the other options of A) providing a much smaller budget to RTE and telling them to cut their costs to measure, or B) acknowledging the billions of taxpayers money that is waste year on year, what's another €200m.

A better question to pose back to him would be "Why in gods name is €200m of taxpayer money given to an organisation that shows such irresponsibility and disregard to financial control?"

How do you enforce Conditional Access to ensure that only those who subscribe can watch RTE? I've seen this proposed here but nobody seems to have much of a clue about how to implement it. Knowing FFG and RTE it would probably get some clueless consultancy from morons with no record of expertise in this field and it would turn into yet another clusterfsck.

Regards...jmcc

We have an orchestra funded through RTE and they don't even get wheeled out to play live music on RTE's DWTS. Instead Spotify gets chucked on. Rubbish production value there.

2 mobile data plans and mobile router for house broadband, so going to pay 3times brilliant idea !

So my household will go from €160 a year to €75 a month?!?!

They can stick that where the sun doesn't shine.

Or why do we spend taxpayers' money to give gobshites like him a platform when they're incapable of being elected to the Dail.

The new charge seems to be more ridiculous than the TV license and it seems as if they are trying to punish people now for what went on last year.

Previously the TV licence was only one per household if you owned a TV.

Now it's going to be on broad road and your post says it's going to hit people using mobile data too.

I mean like this is unreal and incredible.

You use broadband for the interet and for maybe doing online streaming of movies like Netflix as an example. There's so many reasons for broadband. This new thing tells us the government thinks we all must watch rte with our broadband.

Then hitting mobile phones too. Every household would likely have a few different mobiles and payment packages.

I have two mobile phones so that would mean I will need to pay this charge twice and I am not using my mobile phones for watching rte.

Thinking to my neighbours there would be at least 5 mobiles in the house so all of them will have to pay extra for their payment plans and then they are paying many times over where as before the TV licence was only one per household.

This is unreal.