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

RoTelly

BTW Jim Jennings won't be part of the leadership team.

In relation to the director of content, Jim Jennings, Mr Bakhurst said he had spoken to him on Sunday and that he will be “off sick for a while”.

“I agreed with him that we’d have discussions when he’s better. I’m trying to be fair and decent to individuals here as well.

“Jim has made it clear to me that going forward, he doesn’t want to be part of the new leadership team on the executive. But we’re going to have further discussions with him.”

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/rte-commercial-director-wont-appear-before-committee-as-she-retires-1500140.html

I wonder if he's still being paid by RTÉ during his illness, I hope he's alright and he doesn't have a case of D4itis. You think when he's better he want to dive straight back into his role.

fplfan12345

Is your one Dee still sick ?

Widdensushi

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916682#Comment_121916682

She was at every Patrick's day parade in the country,,, accompanied by a medical team in many....

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121896166#Comment_121896166

Ha we must be related, I think I knew of one other family in our area without access to Cable, our neighbour even offered to pay for my mother saying its not that expensive, my parents just didn't want cable, nothing to do with content. By the time we got the "other" channels we were a bit disappointed in 1999, though TV had massively changed by that point.

In fairness RTÉ had changed massively in the 1990s with the arrival or rebrand of RTÉ2 as Network 2. I remember one summer doing an Irish summer course, every Thursday they'd all be talking about Cracker, which had already air on ITV, but they all re-watched "because it was so good", which it was.

Viscount Aggro

This is what is coming...

People who have stopped paying the TV licence will be made to pay, even if they dont own a TV.

saabsaab

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121918222#Comment_121918222

It wasn't about the TV for a while now..

fuzzy dunlop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121914100#Comment_121914100

Your arguments are selective and based on narratives.Not to mention contradictory .They are basically colloquial sentiments expressed as if they were facts Your obvious facts are only obvious within your own belief system.In other words heuristics. When you look at them coldly and logically then they do not stack up. RTE might be a force for liberalism if there was no other media available, but there was, and those other media were ahead of the curve compared to RTE. It is well documented by Irish historians that huge social change was anticipated by politicians like Sean Lemass who unlike Dev was resigned to it.In other words it was a fait acompli. RTE was set up to attenuate the influence of the BBC which de-facto meant it was an obstacle to liberalization.

You introduced Europe into the discussion by claiming Ireland is an outlier when it came to abortion and divorce.I can only refute this by comparing Ireland to European countries. It is dishonest to claim it can be done otherwise.And when you do you can see it isn't an outlier, there are six other jurisdictions to this day in Europe where abortion on demand is banned. These range from micro states up to states of approximately 40million people (Poland). What was that again about the exception that proves the rule? You can add another six states who to this day have thresholds that are so low that they are almost beyond use to many of the people who may want it. So the best you can say about this straw man argument is that Ireland is in a group of countries that have conservative laws on abortion. But that is not the point is it? If abortion is your Gold standard for liberalism then the Soviet Union would have been a liberal beacon on the world.But the point here is that RTE was impotent in influencing change. You seem to concede this while also claiming it's not RTE's fault. So who's wasting whose time here?

Your other tactic is essentially cakism .Your initial claim was;

"Ireland was a complete outlier in European terms until this century."

Who am I supposed to compare us to in order refute to or affirm this? Who? Do tell if its not Europe! Read it again! You said Ireland was a complete outlier compared to Europe? You used the word complete.... therefore it is disingenuous to try and restrict things to abortion when you yourself put it in European Terms. It has to be done holistically! And then it becomes clear that Ireland is not an outlier.For that to be the case the rest of Europe would have to be homogeneous which it was far from. Half of Europe was governed by totalitarian communist puppet states. 60 million more western Europeans were governed by fascist or pseudo fascist authoritarian states until 1975. Not something you can just dismiss! I am not moving the goalposts. You are running away from the goal in a game that you chose to play.

I can remember being thought religion in 1991. It was in fifth year of an all boys school which by that time was less catechism and mostly a combination of religion, ethics and social studies. Our teacher who despite being very religious was pushing the envelope by trying to teach us things about STD's, teenage pregnancy, how to avoid it and the age of consent.He did this because he understood that if we were not already f#*!ing then we were about to start. The most remarkable thing was that most of us believed that the age of consent was 16 and not 17.We thought this because of BBC soaps like Eastenders where it came up in story lines. One or two of us thought abortion and divorce was already available. It certainly wasn't RTE who set us straight!

Vote4Squirrels

Really stupid question I’m sure, apologies but I spent time in the UK - the BBC gets licence fee money as it has no adverts.

Why then does RTE get the licence fee AND have adverts and programme sponsorship ?? They must be coining it in!!!

kazamo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121920786#Comment_121920786

Ireland doesn’t have the population to fund the licence fee model only. The could make it work, but it would mean a tv licence costing over 500 per annum.

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121920831#Comment_121920831

Thanks - makes sense. Tho with new ways of watching TV they should go subscription and ads/sponsorship only and scrap the licence in my view.

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121920738#Comment_121920738

Fuzzy I agree with you that RTÉ wasn't this liberalizing force. (It is odd that you completely missed the 1986 divorce referendum you would have been 10 or 11, even if your family were only watching TV your telling me that no one in your class or their families read news papers, did you know we were in the EEC).

Correct on all fronts on Soviety and other countries, Franco in Spain, Junta in Greece. 1960 - 1990 political pressures were great, even the BBC and ITV would have been under some political pressure, its strange when you think that the conservatives set up Channel 4.

you have to remember you are also in a small state of just 2.5m in 1966, RTÉ regardless of funding would also have had to do all the things they did during the 1960s on top of just all this liberalisation that you are talking about. RTÉ's program making is few and far between in any decade to be a liberalising force even today would be difficult considering that RTÉ2 for example only produces an hour of TV a week outside of sport.

I'd argue RTÉ's conservative aspects are also few and far between. At the end of the day regardless of how you look at RTÉ they really didn't produce any programming worth remembering, remember that 1970s sit-com or that 1980s Detective drama were they good!

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916530#Comment_121916530

Jaysus, maybe it's time to put RTE in quarantine, or stop serving roast asbestos with plutonium sauce in the canteen

Baba Yaga

was just thinking that...none of them in there look very well for some reason...send in the lads in the haz-mat suits and fumigate the place,mind you it would have to be closed for a while after that!

Norrie Rugger Head

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121895940#Comment_121895940

Cork Multi was massive in the 80s.

Wasn't it which became NTL originally?

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921186#Comment_121921186

I don't know, we never got cable. We were getting patchy but free UK channels with a really tall aerial, it was the 80s, money tight so that was as good as it got.

The station with the clearest reception was the Welsh s4c. That's about as much as I remember.

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921219#Comment_121921219

Yeah I agree, spillover was really only available on the East Coast and boarder counties (It would be interesting to know how far in FreeView receptions are received from NI and Wales). Reason for RTÉ2 in the 1970s was due to Midlands and South west looking for access to the UK channels, one option was to just rebroadcast BBC1.

Waterford and Galway were CableVision (not sure about the name) which merged with Dublin independent cable companies to become Cablelink. Dungarvan was Casey Cable, the last of the independent cable companies.

There is a reason why Ireland was cabled over the decades, we are/were one of the most cabled countries in Europe.

fuzzy dunlop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121920918#Comment_121920918

But why are you asking if I knew that Ireland was in the EEC or was I aware of the divorce referendum? Of course I was aware of them. Is it because I merely didn't mention them? The reason I didn't is because there was no real need to as far as I am concerned because the other aspects were self evident.The hypothesis here is that RTE were a force for liberalization. Same thing with regard to the newspapers. I didn't mention them directly but I did say that there were other sources of information available for decades such as literature, cinema and cinema news reels. And of course radio. But now that you mention newspapers. The British Redtops or Irish editions of them were widely available, where you could see in black and white British journalism hunting down and exposing gay celebrities like Kenny Everett or George Michael. This type of crass journalism was largely balked at in Ireland and the Irish newspapers knew better then to emulate it. Emmet Stagg died this week. When he was caught cruising in the Phoenix park there was a backlash by the Irish public against the way he was treated. Compare this to George Michael who only came out as gay because of the salacious exposure of the US and British media. The fact is that a lot of what is passed of as Irish conservatism is sometimes just civility.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/irish-minister-set-to-survive-scandal-1427878.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVJPY3dpA38

I was on holidays, camping with my parents in Rosbeigh when the divorce referendum was held. We used to go into Glenbeigh every morning for fresh milk, bread and the newspapers. I remember well, the shopkeeper who would have been only in his thirties celebrating the results of the referendum like it was a football final. Ironically this was one of they areas of the country afaik who did not have access to the BBC directly only RTE television.

There is an Irish delusion that we're terminally unique. We're this remote outpost of Western Europe clinging on to religion and all of those silly old things. I really saw it in the Netherlands when I moved there, where I would and still do hear Irish young people talking to Dutch people as if they grew up with John Charles McQuaid looking over their shoulder. And yet when I walked home from work every day you would see a crucifix on a prominent place in a ton of houses. This is in Eindhoven which is the tech hub of the country. The largest public broadcaster here is an amalgamation of different christian broadcasting channels. While the schools contrary to what is believed are pillarized and many state funded schools have a christian ethos. Ireland is a small country with a third of the population that obviously can't pillarize in the same way. Yet we still have idiotic hand wringing over the angelus or if a newspaper reports on what bishop says on an issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/16/bookerprize2005.thebookerprize

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921512#Comment_121921512

I asked because you said you were in 5th year when you found out you couldn't be divorced in Ireland in 1991. Yet you'd have been aware of the 1986 divorce referendum and you'd have been aware of other referenda for Europe during that period, these would have been debated and reported on, not just on TV but also on Radio.

So your either saying that broadcasters and media didn't matter in relation to the liberalization of Ireland or It did. you've not even tackled the point that I made in relation to the lack of TV programming coming from Ireland on RTÉ.

Think about it going back to the soaps RTÉ had 2 by the 1990s both part-time, and not much else in terms of scripted programming (Comedy and Drama). Do you think this is honestly down to funding?

People in Ireland cling on to the ideas e.g. that Peig was taught in schools up until the 2000s, I'd say there are certain people that I was in Irish Class with that groan at the idea of Peig... yet they never studied the book.

Karppi

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921512#Comment_121921512

Sorry, couldn't resist posting this. You'll have to go to YouTube, I'm afraid (follow the link after you've pressed Play)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4FTgWdU9sk&ab_channel=MullisPartners

fuzzy dunlop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121921581#Comment_121921581

I think you are misreading what I posted. There was one or two in the class who thought divorce was available in Ireland probably due to British and American cultural influences. I wasn't one of them for the reasons I explained in a later post. The age of consent misconception was widespread was very clearly coming from British influence because in America I believe it varies by state. I can't be sure if I was previously aware of it before then of it being 17 or not but now that I am back on the subject I remember in the noughties working with a woman in her thirties who were under the same misconception. Me telling her that it was 17 and her being adamant that it 16.

You seem to be attributing something to me about ignorance of the EEC and other things. I am not sure where this is coming from. If you could point it out I would appreciate it.Are you confusing me with another poster perhaps? I have gone trough all of my posts and mentioned many things that would have influenced liberalization of the country despite RTE. Among the list were the urbanization and industrialization of the country, the EU, UN, Cinema, Newspapers and Literature. I have also made remarks about content.

There was some content that was very good but not enough in my opinion to make it justify a budget of one third of a billion euros.There children's Irish language content back when I was a child was like Peig TV and was dismal when you compare it to something like Aifric that cam much later on in TG4. They had good shows like Nighthawks back around 1987/88 and No Disco in the nineties. Don't feed the gondolas wasn't bad I suppose. They mostly had a lot of syndicated stuff like the Cosby Show, Our House and 7th Heaven and this is the stuff they were and are over reliant on.Then it was the Bill and old episodes of CSI.

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121922366#Comment_121922366

Because of you example of others suggesting that they did not know that divorce was not available in Ireland, I was concluding that they (though I assumed you were talking about yourself) were clearly unaware of any news or current affairs in Ireland such as Referendum on Europe and other changes to the constitution.

I gather from what you saying many weren't watching RTÉ in urban areas. I know one of my Mam's friends say she only started watching RTÉ when her children left home as they had control of the remote!

I think they had new episodes of CSI. (I like that you mention Our House, I was think about that show a few months ago, its very random, it only ran for 2 seasons. It is like Human Target which only had 7 episodes but loads of people remember). And I'd say neither of those shows made it to UK TV, but I could be wrong, it's nearly like I'll Fly Away, random 90s programmes that RTÉ aired.

saabsaab

We had TV only from 1962. Only got RTE which didn't start until about 5pm and ended before midnight when the national anthem played. That was until 1978 when RTE1 and 2 arrived. This was the view of the outside world for most of us in the country and for many it was a shock what was happening outide Ireland, brought into the living room by RTE!

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121923264#Comment_121923264

IMO if in 1978 a commercial broadcasters had been the choice to operate both Radio 2 and RTÉ 2, we'd be saying the same.

If in 1960 Teilifse Éireann was set up as a separate organisation to Raidio Éireann we'd be saying the same thing about TÉ.

IMO it didn't really matter who got to broadcast, something new or different would be beamed into our home.

I think RTÉ is praised because that was what was there, and because we believe their argument that it was the best they could offer on the money they had. I no longer believe this, I think RTÉ did the least they could and got away with it.

Rubberchikken

'ingrained hanit'. I.e. not actually listening to the moron on the radio but too lazy to change the station.

This o'reilly chap hasn't a clue.

Has he ever actually listened to the nit that is D'arcy?

They could have sent Ray off to wherever and saved themselves a fortune by playing whit noise for an hour or two. Doubtful anyone would have missed him.

Widdensushi

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121924547#Comment_121924547

Ray that left the country when enda Kenny became taoiseach,,is he back?

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121924547#Comment_121924547

Another RTÉ executive that potentially left under an exit package.

Baba Yaga

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121924665#Comment_121924665

ray d'arcy?yer man that used be on with zig and zag? thought he retired years ago...

HildaOgdenx

If D'arcy was being paid 100k, I would still consider that far too much, considering the few hours of work involved.

So nothing has changed despite all that has happened in the past year or so.

RTE bosses know that nobody else would want these guys, never mind pay them ridiculous salaries. So they continue to pay them ridiculous salaries. Right. 🤷‍♀️

Karppi

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121924990#Comment_121924990

Maybe he did; he certainly threw the towel in some years ago. In any commercial organisation he'd be gone, gone, gone.

KB is not dealing with the "talent" at all. Talk about over promising and under delivery.

Brendan Bendar

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121926157#Comment_121926157

Yes , not a word about them…