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

I hope she is not getting an easy time when seen out and about.

I hope the public are giving her plenty and continue to do so til she answers some questions.

48? More nearer 60

not sure if this has been asked/addressed yet, but with so much dodgy dealings happening in RTE can a criminal fraud case be established? Or, despite how outrageously some of the revelations have been, have no laws actually been broken?

I still can’t comprehend what the implications would be had this all been in a private company.

Well considering she can chat with her solicitor I would say yes. Her big sickness is a bad case of being caught out.

Well she did have a persistent cough, when it came to the licence fee.

Seems to have lost her voice entirely now.

I don't see how she can lead any sort of normal life. Anyone who knows her outside immediate family must despise her. That'd do anyone's head in, she'd be far better advised to face the music and at the very least apologise publicly for her poor performance. Maybe she'll move abroad and hide away.

I think people need to stop paying the license fee and anyone who sees Dee out and about should take a video of her and put it online asking how sick are you? She needs to feel the full weight of the publics anger and forced to stay in her house as if she is well enough to travel outside she is well enough to answer a few questions from her bed via video link she would not even have to travel and any government party putting in a license fee replacement tax in should have the same pressure applied as the water charges - The water charges have showed that if the publics will is strong enough you can stop the gouging from the government... RTE and gov are 2 sets of piggies sitting at the same table having a faux argument there is dirt over on the politicians side and Miss Forbes I reckon will know where some of the bodies are buried which is why she has not been chased in any meaningful way. So don't pay and any license fee substitute that would be put in to RTE should have people on the on the street protesting if the Irish public do this in a high % then RTE will go the way of the dodo and wouldn't it be funny seeing them trying to compete with the private offerings.

Is it not illegal to supply money to a person or organisation that you believe to be involved in illegal or criminal activity?

Serious question by the way. If you were helping someone launder money, even if you made no gain, you would still be convicted?

Martin may be out of her depth and somebody with business expertise may be required, but it is not a TD's job to be a business person, any more than it is their job to be a school teacher, a publican or a lawyer. So unless you want the country to change from being a democracy to being an autocracy or perhaps an oligarchy, please accept that people from a variety of walks of life will become TDs and therefore also will become ministers. Some of these people will have an ideological agenda (as our Green TDs), others will just be cute hoors (as so many in FF, FG & Labour).

RTÉ has been out of control for decades, there is nothing recent about it. So many refer to it as Pravda because it has been a government mouthpiece uncritically spreading government (FFFGLab) propaganda for so long. None of this is the current minister's doing, and I agree that she may well be out of her depth here, but the story is not about Martin vs Ní Raghallaigh - it's about how dysfunctional RTÉ actually is. Martin may not be the best person to clean it up, but in fairness . like the HSE - it's a poisoned chalice which has festered for so long. It needs to be radically changed, broken up and re-cast.

And not only re-cast - but we've seen time and again in recent years that hoghups in the public service have a cavalier manner of working, including having dodgy meetings with people on official time and neither taking notes nor producing minutes. And no agenda either. Is such a meeting with Ní Raghallaigh not at the centre of this debacle?

No surprise here. Dee is untouchable. She knows it. Her solicitor knows it. The PAC know it. After making out that she's practically on her deathbed, they haven't a leg to stand on when it comes to chasing her. This needed a Garda investigation from the start. It's only in a court where anything gets done in this Banana Republic, and even then it's no slam dunk that any justice will be done.

As it stands, Dee has, I'm sure, her own golden handshake in her arse pocket and a nice pension to see her out for the next 20/30 years. Great little country.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/public-not-told-new-rte-chair-terence-orourke-was-involved-in-kevin-bakhurst-job-interview/a764087574.html

Public not told new RTÉ chair Terence O’Rourke was involved in Kevin Bakhurst job interview

Ah here every week this fraudulent establishment keeps on giving. Jobs for the boys and girls

Never paying that tax again

I was amused by the statement that listed all the things she can't do , if she's not in a coma she's lying

Read this, this morning. talk about a set-up insider? RTE is really a sink hole of depravity! transparency the “minister” states, all the time plotting the removal of one chair to replace with an insider of humongous experience of corruption.

At this stage, it is better to just put RTE out of its misery and come clean. This saga will just roll on with lies, lies and more lies. Something or someone MUST become the whistle blower. Bakhurst is up to his eyes in this also.

So for all the cost cuts required rte still decided to send a team over to present the rugby from the ground instead of the rte studio. So who signed off on that

How can you be influenced by TV if you don't have a TV? You are talking as if not having a TV only restricts reception of the BBC. And so what if they were mostly in Dublin? . Once TV's became available it was clear that most people would have had access to the BBC. And btw what do you think people were doing before they had televisions? Dancing at the crossroads to the local fiddler perhaps? You are discounting the effects of newspapers, foreign literature which was abundant (even the stuff that was censored) and radio. Radio shows like the archers were as familiar to Irish audiences as to the British! You are literally claiming that the arrival of RTE was the only vector for the population to be influenced by TV. It clearly wasn't. My father who was based in Kilkenny with the Army in the 1950's used to drive to rural pubs on a Saturday with his mates to watch the Busby babes. No RTE required. RTE was set up to counter or attenuate the influence of the BBC. Therefore the only conclusion you can make from this is that the state sought to limit the cultural influence of the BBC. And that is the point. Liberalization happened despite RTE not because if it. By 1975 over a million people (at least) between Dublin and Waterford had access to cable TV or the pipe as it was called. Those that didn't have it used the BBC aerial which almost every house in that region had back then. So any monopoly that RTE may have had was virtually gone after about 13 years. If it existed at all. In 1985 people in Dublin and Waterford with 'the pipe' would have received broadcasts from Channel 4 such as 'My beautiful launderette' which explored LGBQT issues. In 1996 RTE were still agonizing over a 'Gay Kiss' on Fair City that never happened. I will say it again. Had RTE not existed then the forces of liberalization that were absent would easily have been taken up by the BBC other media.