"What kind of public media does Ireland need?"

It's being widely reported today that RTE will, after all, get the twenty million euro extra it was expecting for twenty twenty-seven, despite being told on Tuesday that it was being cut from the budget. A fierce row ensued between Media Minister Patrick O'Donovan and RTE Director General Kevin Bakhurst after the min-- after Minister O'Donovan said he was not fulfilling the funding commitment for RTE because he believed the broadcaster had been too slow to reform. Following a hastily convened meeting between the two men yesterday, however, calm had been somewhat restored. Kevin Bakhurst gave some brief remarks after the meeting.

We had a extremely constructive meeting with the minister, um, and we've agreed that we're gonna carry on working with his officials, uh, to try and find a resolution to this. But he was very positive, which is very welcome from our part. Um, and I'm really not gonna answer the question 'cause it's delicate enough, and we want this process to be properly carried out. Um, but the relationship is good, and it was a very open and constructive meeting.

So while it appears that that issue may soon be resolved, it has raised wider questions over how we fund public service broadcasting. And we're joined now by Eileen Culloty, Deputy Director of the DC Institute for Media, Democracy, and Society. And Eileen, thanks for coming in to us this morning. Um, what do you make, first of all, of this row that emerged off the back of the budget this week?

Well, there's been a lot of criticism of Minister O'Donovan, and much of that criticism is deserved. But I see this story as just the latest episode in a decades-long saga about the funding of RTE and public media. And every time one of these episodes blows up, we get a lot of coverage, we get a lot of political grandstanding. So who made this decision? Who ordered the flip-flops? But the big core decisions, there's never any action on them, and those decisions are, what kind of public media does Ireland need going into the rest of the twenty-first century, and how should that be funded? And the failure to answer those questions is a political failure. Only the politicians can make the core decision about will they give funding, and what are we going to have?

Mm. I suppose the problem is, and particularly after the various controversies that have plagued R-RTE in the last couple of years, that any increase in the license fee, for example, would be very politically unpopular.

Well, I find it astonishing that we're still talking about a TV license fee. You know, it's twenty twenty-six. TV, people don't go out and buy TVs. That's not how people consume media. And there are only a few ways that me-- public media can be funded. This isn't rocket science. You can have the public fund it, you can have the Exchequer fund it, you can have commercial sponsorship, advertising, or some combination of those. The problem with commercial funding is that you end up with a highly commercialized media. The problem with Exchequer funding is that you need a political culture that isn't going to interfere with it.

Mm.

And people can decide for themselves whether we have that kind of culture, and then that