RTÉ and BBC are both hanging on decisions on their futures. Which one is being handled better?

Its executives rarely care to acknowledge it, but RTÉ has always swum in the slipstream of its much larger counterpart across the water. That is hardly surprising. The BBC is the world’s oldest public service broadcaster and, for most of its history, its finest.

So RTÉ is well used to unfavourable, and often unfair, comparisons. Unfair because the differences of scale are enormous, and with them come reservoirs of creative talent and technical resources that were always impossible to match on this side of the Irish Sea.

Still, having such a neighbour has generally been good news for anyone who cares about quality and editorial independence at RTÉ, because it offered a benchmark against which Montrose could be measured.

Less often compared is how the two countries’ political systems manage their relationship with public service broadcasting. That is even less flattering, and the same excuses do not apply.

The UK has far more rigorous and transparent structures for deciding what its national broadcaster is for and how to pay for it. Chief among them is the royal charter, renewed every decade after intense scrutiny and debate at Westminster. Ireland’s approach is ramshackle, as this month’s shambolic budget handling of RTÉ’s funding demonstrated.

[ Income from ‘broken’ television licence fee down €5.7m in first nine monthsOpens in new window ]

We are now on the cusp of an alignment as rare as a total solar eclipse. Both governments face the same deadline for deciding how to pay for public service broadcasting and make it fit for the mid-21st century. The BBC’s current charter expires on December 31st, 2027. So does the three-year funding deal struck for RTÉ in 2024.

In London, the process began last December with a green paper canvassing everything from modest licence fee reform to advertising and a premium subscription tier, followed by a public consultation and a lengthy House of Commons committee inquiry.

In Dublin, we had the Future of Media Commission, whose recommendation on funding was rejected. Whether that recommendation was wise is debatable, but it hardly justifies the procrastination that has followed.

In the UK, these questions are argued over in parliament, on a timetable fixed by the charter. In Ireland, they are settled, or not, in irate correspondence between departments, while a toothless Oireachtas committee goes in search of soundbites. Neither country faces an easy decision but, despite all its problems, the BBC is starting from a much better place.

One reason is that the UK licence fee rises with inflation under the current funding settlement and now stands at £180 (€212). The Irish fee, frozen at €160 for 18 years, would be about €195 had it kept pace with prices.

Last year, RTÉ received €183.5 million from the licence fee and €41.3 million directly from the exchequer. Indexation would have brought in roughly €40 million more, almost exactly the size of that top-up. Most of the so-called bailout was simply the cost of political reluctance to grasp that political nettle.

And that assumes the precipitous fall in licence sales still happened. There, too, the contrast is stark. Between 2022 and 2025, UK licences in force fell by about 4 per cent. In Ireland, sales fell by 19 per cent over the same period. Whether through evasion or households abandoning traditional TV, every lost licence hits the bottom line.

Only about four in 10 Irish households now buys a licence. Strip out those with no television, and the half a million or so with State-funded free licences, and somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of those legally obliged to pay do not.

A household charge at the current rate, levied on everyone not entitled to a free licence, would raise roughly €90 million to €115 million a year more than the existing system, allowing for a reduction in the current €160 price. Richard Bruton in 2019 promised such a charge to arrive by 2024. It never did.

UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy and her Irish counterpart Patrick O’Donovan face essentially the same problems. But O’Donovan’s are far worse and that, for all RTÉ’s faults, owes less to the broadcaster than to the short-termism and procrastination of successive Irish governments.

[ I have paid my TV licence long after I needed to. But RTÉ is testing my patienceOpens in new window ]

Which brings us, sadly, to the latest unfavourable comparison. The public consultation on charter renewal closed in March. The House of Commons committee reported at the start of October, pronouncing the licence fee outdated, pressing for universal funding and an end to political appointments to the BBC board.

Nandy is expected to publish a white paper before Christmas, with a draft charter debated in both houses of parliament next year and taking effect on January 1st, 2028. Many observers think that timetable uncomfortably tight, and fear a fudge.

Here, a fudge is almost guaranteed. O’Donovan told the Oireachtas media committee in May that the current arrangement would not continue beyond 2027, and promised on budget day to bring options to Cabinet within weeks. Since then he has fallen ill, and his department’s secretary general has taken on the administrative side of his role. We will see how far that already vague timetable slips.

So no green paper. No public consultation. No in-depth parliamentary hearings. If, as seems clear, next year’s allocation emerged from a row between two Ministers in the days before the budget, how confident can we be that the larger, longer-term decision will get the care and openness it deserves?

Here are the unpalatable facts. The licence fee is broken and on the verge of falling into disrepute among those who still pay it. Direct annual exchequer funding erodes the core principle of editorial independence which has survived for decades, despite frequent assaults, at both the BBC and RTÉ.

A universal media charge would be politically unpopular and is regarded by some as regressive. It is far from clear that the organisations themselves have the capacity to remain relevant in the post-broadcast age.

[ TV licence fee ‘extremely difficult’ to collect if evaders not prosecuted, says RTÉ boss Kevin BakhurstOpens in new window ]

Once again, the famous line from The Leopard sums it up. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.