Credit: Gript

Yes, RTE is openly interfering in the election

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According to the various opinion polls and bookmakers odds, which may or may not be correct, the Independent Ireland party is in with a real shot of winning two, and perhaps even three, MEP seats at the election will be held a week from today. Despite that, not one of their three candidates featured in a single one of the major RTE set piece debates for each constituency. On Monday Night, Niall Boylan in Dublin will be absent from that debate on RTE1, as Ciaran Mullooly was for Ireland North West, and Eddie Punch will be for Ireland South.

Relative no-hopers for a seat, such as Independent Saoirse McHugh and People before Profit’s Brid Smith, will nevertheless be “platformed”.

And yet, despite all that, Independent Ireland’s complaints should be very minor compared to those of other parties.

Yesterday, four small parties on the right – The Irish Freedom Party; Ireland First; The Irish People; and The National Party submitted a joint letter to RTE pointing out that not a single one of their candidates or representatives has been granted any airtime on the national broadcaster during the campaign. The parties charge that this amounts to “election interference” by RTE. They are, self-evidently, correct.

This is also the view of stalwart former RTE and Virgin Media broadcaster Vincent Browne, who said as much in a tweet yesterday, though it should be noted that he was making the case for all candidates, rather than those four parties specifically.

All of this, really, goes to the heart of RTE’s mandate and its claimed reason for existence: That it is a public service broadcaster that produces content in Ireland that commercial entities simply would not. We are compelled by law to fund RTE with a television licence fee in part because we are supposed to subsidise it for producing content that would not be commercially successful, but is nonetheless of public importance.

Like, you know, election coverage.

Yet, in these elections, RTE is essentially pleading a pragmatic case: That it would not be possible to accommodate, in the case of Ireland South, 23 candidates and give them equal time. Therefore it must use some criteria, it pleads, to narrow down the field.

Conveniently enough, those criteria explicitly favour parties that have won elections in the past: So if you are a sitting TD or MEP, you get into a debate (this is why Peadar Toibin and Michael McNamara and Brid Smith make the grade) but if you’re a new party with multiple TDs you do not, which is why Independent Ireland are excluded. Saoirse McHugh and Peter Casey made the debate because they achieved a certain level of support in the last election for these seats.

In other words, RTE’s criteria for coverage come down to a single sentence: If you’ve done well in elections in the past, you are in. If you have not, you are out.

This, of course, misses the entire point of having elections: Elections exist to provide the public with an opportunity to change the direction of the country by reversing the results of previous elections. If, as the national broadcaster, you are excluding new voices from the debate, you are de-facto interfering in the election by declining to make the public equally aware of all their potential choices.

If there is any case to be made for RTE’s existence, then this is what it should be for: Bigger parties and incumbents are already massively advantaged in the election by virtue of their vastly superior funding and established networks of supporters. This advantage is incredibly hard to overcome, which is why all the enthusiasm in the world won’t get John Waters more votes than, say, Maria Walsh next Friday. In campaigning terms, the likes of Mr. Waters will never be fighting with the same resources as Ms Walsh.

Where they should be equal, however, is on the taxpayer funded national public service broadcaster.

What is the point of that broadcaster if it cannot serve the public – and those members of the public offering themselves for public service – by giving all candidates equal time? Why should the public subsidise what is, in effect, the open exercising of RTE’s political bias?

A commercial channel might decide, in the interests of advertisers, to curtail its political coverage and thus pick and choose the candidates it gives airtime to. A publicly funded channel, on the other hand, should not have that luxury.

The end result is that many candidates in this election are running with a dual handicap: Not only are they underfunded compared to the competition, but the one publicly funded platform that is supposed to provide impartial information to the public is declining to even give them an opportunity to introduce themselves to the voters.

What, exactly, is the point of the television licence, if RTE is not going to behave any differently from the commercial stations that don’t receive a penny in public funding? And who is it serving – the public? Or perhaps the political parties already in power that control its purse strings?