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

Is this the state of Governance in semi state and state bodies in this country? Someone was brazen and confident enough to run this production using our funds without approval from the board. The board theselves were obviously not performing in their duties and viewed as a soft touch.

Frightening levels of incompentence with our funds.

€15 per month on every broadband bill is absolutely nuts. It could end up doing damage to Ireland's broadband uptake to fund a legacy industry.

I can see the telcos being really annoyed about this. It could kill half the mobile broadband market for example.

A €15 a month hike in the price of say GoMo or similar would more than double the price of their plans.

This is as stupid as the proposal to tax text messages about 10 years ago.

Also, in most households there's a broadband service on everyone's mobile and probably the fixed line broadband too. So you could be looking at 2, 3 or even 4 people if you'd a couple of teens, with accounts. How's that going to work? There's no way households are going to pay €720 a year for RTE.

At this stage, it looks like they'll have to dismantle RTE. I don't really see how it can be repaired. It's clearly in need of more than restructuring. I think it's time to just start with a totally new model for public service broadcasting.

RTE doesn't even achieve many of the things you'd expect from a PSB. For example it has a complete lack of regional broadcasting and can't even seem to even resource the regional correspondents properly

It's a 1960s model that comes from an era of an assumed monopoly, no satellite, cable or IPTV and a single centralised tv provider when it was extremely expensive and technically complex to produce.

There's a need for a massive rethinking of how we do this, not just lobbing a fee on random utility bills.

I'm still not quite sure what RTE's structure actually is.

It doesn't appear to be a normal company structure. The majority of the so called 'semi-states' like the ESB are structured exactly as a commercial company would be, just with the state as the main or only shareholder.

RTE seems to be some kind of other structure. I've yet to have it properly explained.

It seems to have an executive board and a non-executive board, which used to be called the RTE Authority.

I'm unclear as to whether it's a company or what it is exactly, which is even more bizarre as I can't even seem to find a proper description of it anywhere.

I mean, you can see the structure of it described, but there's no terminology used i.e. 'this is a limited company' etc

Sometimes it seems to behave like a company. Sometimes it behaves like a some other kind of public body that's not quite described.

Does anyone know what it actually is? It's a fairly fundamental question.

That is why there is no Org Chart or staff grade system. Both were promised by the board years ago.