Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been accused of having an “ideological obsession” to privatise “everything that moves” by People Before Profit-Solidarty TD Richard Boyd Barrett.
He said this was either public land to private developers for housing or public service broadcasting.
Speaking in the Dáil, the Dún Laoghaire TD said around one year since the RTÉ payments controversy, the “net result” is the “outsourcing and privatisation of the two flagship programmes of RTÉ – Fair City and the Late Late Show.”
Earlier this week RTÉ management unveiled a five-year plan for the broadcaster that will see the production of programmes including Fair City and The Late Late Show move off site.
Mr Boyd Barrett claimed this would lead to “hundreds of jobs to be lost of ordinary workers who had no hand or part in the malgovernance of the obscene salaries enjoyed by a few at the top”.
He said “the people who are going to lose out are the technical workers, the costume workers, the make-up workers, staging, editing, camera, scripting, floor managers.
“People on modest salaries, may of them having to fight for years even to get proper contracts, some of them still only on temporary contracts – these are the people who are going to lose their jobs,” he said.
“Outsourcing to the private sector, particularly ironic considering that it was the corrosive influence of the commercial sector on shows like the Late Late Show that led people to think they should be paid these obscene salaries in the first place, or that produced things like the barter accounts over business deals with the private sector.
“The consequence we’re now facing is the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, is going to be handed over to the commercial for-profit sector.
“A sector characterised by poor working conditions, lack of pension entitlements, employment insecurity, and the workers believe quite honestly they’re just stringing along the people in Fair City and that this will actually be the beginning of the end of Fair City, in reality.”
Mr Boyd Barret told the Tánaiste “what you should have done and what you should still do is stop this privatising, stop the axing of jobs and fund public service broadcasting properly… by imposing a tax on the profits of people like the social media companies, the ICT companies, instead of a regressive and failing TV licence-funding model which is completely inadequate,” he said.
The Tánaiste responded saying there was a “fundamental difference between outsourcing and privatisation”.
Micheál Martin said Fianna Fáil had a “strong record historically” of building up State enterprises.
“RTÉ is not for sale – I don’t think there’s any proposal to put RTÉ on the market or on the stock exchange – that is privatisation,” Mr Martin said.
He said the Government has made clear that it “doesn’t want mandatory redundancies” and that RTÉ has committed to seeking “voluntary redundancies.”
He said public funding of RTÉ has increased and the Government “is and will make a decision in respect of the future funding of RTÉ.”
The Tánaiste said commercial revenues formed part of RTÉ’s funding for “many, many decades…and it is now proposing in its latest strategy to increase the level of content produced by the independent production sector.
“And that was signalled in the strategic vision document which the broadcaster published last November.
“And secondly, it had already been recommended by the Future of Media Commission, which was established to consider the significant challenges facing the wider broadcasting and media sector… and to make recommendations so we could continue to have a sustainable public sector broadcaster and public service content.
Mr Martin said TG4 “sources almost its entire schedule from the independent sector”.
He said a “balance” was needed and “I do accept the need for in-house talent to be developed within RTÉ itself”.
“At the end of day, RTÉ has to manage its affairs,” he said, and he did not think the “operational management of RTÉ can be undertaken by the Oireachtas or indeed by Government.”
He said the Government has to look at the overall strategic framework in terms of policy and funding and it will make a decision on this “in the next number of weeks”.
