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

The very same people who tell us that we should pay the TV license for public service broadcasting who are the least likely to watch anything on RTÉ.

They have gone quiet on the number of TV licence renewals.

My theory is, they want to keep a lid on evasions, until the new funding model involving Revenue is announced.

Well I'm more 60s and 70s. RTE was regarded by many as the source of liberal nonsense by many at the time..

No one should ever have to pay a tv license again until Dee Forbes and her ridiculously stupid look-at-me glasses are forced to explain their incompetence/fraud/corruption/mismanagment etc etc etc etc etc etc.

There isn't a person in the country who believes her medically unfit nonsense. Doctor who signed that should be struck off as well.

You can't answer my question so you respond with abuse.

You are wasting time denying two obvious facts - RTÉ was a force for social liberalism over the past 60 years and that Ireland used to be an outlier in Europe on social issues.

Both points were obvious to everyone at the time, especially the conservatives. If change didn't come as quickly as you would like, it is nonsense to blame RTÉ.

And don't keep shifting the goal posts! First you went back to the 60s and early 70s for the Mediterranean dictators. Now you try the pre-1989 Communist States as if they can be compared to Ireland. If it makes you happy, I will agree that there was a European country which was as conservative as Ireland used to be on social issues- Malta. The exception that proves the rule!

Answered on Feb 8th.

Interesting she effectively gives the go ahead in that answer: -

You'd wonder why the minister would give an explanatory note on the reasons for dropping these services. Also there is no savings if RTÉ do not replace the +1's with commercial alternatives, cost of those broadcasts get subsumed into the other services on Saorview.

And as I read it she gives no explanation for the removal of the digital stations.

Another PQ to the minister where she seems not to answer

1. she should have answered An Post does not come under the Remit of the Department of Media
2. she should have then suggested the PQ go to the relevant minster (Eamon Ryan)
3. she could have got her Civil Servants to call An Post for the information.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!