I have paid my TV licence long after I needed to. But RTÉ is testing my patience

As crazy as it sounds, I have continued to pay the TV licence fee well beyond the point where it was lawfully required. This munificence is not because the €160 is burning a hole in my puny bank account, but because it represents a civic effort to preserve a safe-house of reliable, accountable broadcast news and cultural sovereignty. Even to its haters, the need for RTÉ must be obvious. We know what happens when television audiences are split into parallel warring universes. Have a look at the US if you can bear it, or try to imagine Britain without the BBC. But RTÉ is trying my patience. Like many radio listeners, I access it by smartphone via the Listen app. Just how many of us there are is shrouded in mystery for some reason, but one calculation puts smartphone and smart speaker listeners at under 12 per cent of total radio listening. This is an indicator of the number who feel a fresh surge of rage every time they are greeted by the so-called pre-roll advertisements. They cut into live programming, and that could be six times a day if you tend to tune in just in time for the news headlines. If there’s a pause or a brief disconnection, the service is interrupted to play the ad all over again. Sometimes, maddeningly, the ad is a plug for RTÉ itself. Yes, we know RTÉ derives its dual income from the licence and advertisements and that there are more important things to rage about. But for a broadcaster that rightly prides itself on the calibre of its news and current affairs programming – already punctuated with numerous, lengthy advertising breaks – the pre-roll ads feel cheap. They play more like a Del Boy bilking the last drop from a dopey audience than an introduction to Ireland’s authoritative, national public service media organisation. READ MOREIt’s all part of the relentless hustle. Most of us have learned to be wary of the requirement to “sign in” or register on any website, knowing that by doing so, our data is probably red meat to be segmented and pitched to advertisers. RTÉ has made no secret of a plan to phase in compulsory registration across its video and audio services. It makes sense at several levels. Registration would provide proof of use and relevance of a kind useful (or not) to a publicly-funded organisation. It would provide significant information, such as users’ age bands, locations and preferences and, for audiences, a more personalised service with options such as “continue listening”, recommendations and queues. But of course there’s more to it. RTÉ’s own rate card tells advertisers that compulsory registration will yield richer information about audiences and better-targeted advertising. That’s what commercial organisations do, of course, and if we give it any thought at all, we put up with it for the most part. But RTÉ is still largely funded by the mandatory licence – “It’s The Law”, as the ad tells us over and over and over – in addition to large chunks of taxpayers’ cash disbursed by the Government (of which a promised but unforthcoming €20 million hijacked the news last week). So even the heart-sinking phrase “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” falls short in this case. We are paying – and we are also the product. It gets harder to feel much affinity with an organisation that views our personal information and behaviour as just another data grab.After several years of it, the recurring headlines featuring RTÉ in the news as opposed to RTÉ reporting the news are also getting wearisome. At one point last week it inserted itself as the lead in its own news headlines and Morning Ireland newspaper segment, reasoning no doubt that the financial health of the national semistate broadcaster is always in the public interest and that it has a duty to cover it as it would any other important public entity. It could also be argued that it skated close to confusing that brief with the use of its powerful, publicly-funded platforms to defend RTÉ’s corporate interests. No other entity has that level of pervasive air power to put its own chief executive/director general out front of the main news programmes to advocate for itself against a Government Minister. [ Credit unions win again as Re-turn, Ryanair and RTÉ fare poorly for customer serviceOpens in new window ]Even when – or especially when – the Minister concerned, Patrick O’Donovan, has a history of howlers (his choice of RTÉ as the budget patsy was always going to win the headlines against a low-key budget), it was surely possible to stall the predictable news storm with a calm announcement of an efficient two-day investigation and a couple of grown-up meetings. Instead, with even more tiring predictability, the Public Accounts Committee is gearing up for another “grilling” of RTÉ executives about who knew what and when about the withheld €20 million, amid emotive speculation about compulsory redundancies and the impact on small independent producers. Meanwhile, Wednesday’s Dáil sitting has been cancelled due to a countrywide public sector strike. For what it’s worth, my €160 hangs in the balance.