It would be expected of me to be critical of what is contained particularly in the Radio and Television Bill. I want to put it on record first of all that I am not. I am a somewhat disappointed supporter of public service broadcasting in this country. First, I would like to compliment the Minister on getting something moving in this area. We have sat back for a number of years and allowed total anarchy to develop on the radio side of the airwaves. Up until recently we have chosen to pretend and fool ourselves that nothing was happening with satellite television broadcasting. I am aware, although I do not want to appear to be in any way critical, that the Minister's Department were informed well in advance because on a few occasions in recent years I have found them extremely helpful on queries that had nothing to do with legislation but on matters I was interested in. Officials of the Minister's Department were extremely helpful on matters to do with satellite broadcasting. They seemed to be well informed, confident and assured and not in the least what I would have expected from the stereotype civil servants. They were more than forthcoming with information and assistance, maybe they told me more than the Minister would have wanted them to tell me. I may have let out a serious secret now and caused trouble between the Minister and his officials. Giving me information might not be part of their game at all.
There are serious philosophical questions to be addressed, I am not going to deal with the details of these Bills. Other people, and perhaps myself, can do this on Committee Stage. The principles of these Bills are well worth addressing. There has been considerable and vocal criticism of these Bills from the Left on the grounds that they are breaking the public sector monopoly on broadcasting. I am not aware of any socialist canon which dictates that broadcasting, as distinct from other forms of the media, should somehow be the monopoly of the State. What I and many other people are unhappy about is the possibility of people, who have simply got money and not much else to offer, identifying the media as another method of making lucrative progress and making a lot of money out of something.
Can I, totally speculatively, draw a contrast? In terms of the future of broadcasting there is an interesting contrast to be made. It appears from what we read in the newspapers that satellite broadcasting and cable broadcasting, particularly of a specialist nature, has been something of a commercial success in the United States. The proliferation of cable services, the multiplicity of services provided by pay channels etc. in the United States has been used by people here as a model of what they assume would happen here with the advent of satellite broadcasting.
People have presumed similar proliferations. There has been a similar willingness to pay for such services by people in Europe. There is a fundamental mistake here. This is a sort of compliment that I would like to pay to public service broadcasts. We have the distinct advantage in this island of growing up with a standard of radio and in particular of television service probably second to none. I particularly want to mention not only our own national broadcasting services but also those of the United Kingdom, our nearest island. We have got accustomed to a high standard of news, current affairs, drama, documentaries, nature programmes etc.
Comparing the quality that we are used to from the products of these islands with the quality of much that is imported from the United States might perhaps be an indicator of why specialist satellite broadcasting and cable broadcasting in the United States has been so successful, because the higher quality type of programmes have followed on from a lowest common denominator style of television in the United States, whereas we have started off with a high standard of broadcasting which some of the satellite broadcasts seem to be intent on diluting now. It is an interesting fact, which I am sure the Minister knows better than I do, because he probably has the results of the market surveys done by the cable services, that the vast majority of those who have had the dubious privilege of watching ten different satellite channels for the last 18 months have made one thing perfectly clear — if they are asked to pay for them they do not want them. The cable services have discovered this.
There is no prospect of people paying for Sky, Super or any of the other channels which are supposed to be the harbingers of the future. There is also the fact that the cable services have shown a remarkable reluctance to ask people to pay for them and that the Minister has directed them that they cannot charge for them. I am always happy when Ministers tell people they must not charge for things. The Minister was doing the inevitable anyway. If the vast majority of the Irish public were asked to pay for what they have seen on satellite television they would have refused point blank to pay a penny for it. My children are very fond of Sky channel, but that is because they are seeing serials that I saw as a child 20 years ago and which Sky now recycle with great abandon and which the children who have never seen them before find very entertaining. That is about it.
We may well be talking ourselves into a crisis or a perception about satellite broadcasting, in particular, which is not real. You can go on multiplying the number of programmes, because, for instance, there is so much sporting activity going on in the world that you could probably fill four channels with specialised sports reports. At present there seems to be almost a limitless amount of wrestling available on a limitless number of channels on almost a limitless number of nights. It presumably has the one thing in common, that it costs the broadcasters very little to purchase it. Whatever can or need be said about satellite broadcasting, it can be said that, as of now, the mainstream satellite channels are not any threat to any of the two Irish channels or to any of the United Kingdom channels.
There may well be a miraculous new supply of high quality programmes about to be generated by Rupert Murdock, Robert Maxwell, etc., in the immediate future which will tempt us all away from the high standards we are used to from the British and Irish services. However, I doubt it, because the extent of investment and expertise involved in those, the standards demanded are so different from the standards those channels have so far produced, that I am not sure we will have anything other than a large expanding balloon which, sooner or later, will do what balloons which expand indefinitely do, that is, it will burst.
If I were a high risk investor or a gambler I would not put my money into satellite broadcasting as one of the guarantees of future lucrative returns, in these islands at least. The people of these islands have got used to a high standard of broadcasting and, so far, they have seen absolutely nothing from the new challenge from satellite broadcasting that will influence them in the least to change their tastes in broadcasting. I hope we will not have any attempts, covert or overt, to persuade people to change. There are indications in some of the British newspapers that the British Government are so concerned about public resistence to satellite broadcasting that they are talking about moving the goal posts as it were and making some of the land based stations available to those whom it was expected would be the entrepreneurs of the satellites in order to persuade people to begin to use satellite broadcasting.
They are concealing that the quality of television programming available in these islands at present is so high that no commercial operator, operating on purely commercial terms and given the capital investment required, could possibly be expected to compete. It is a backhanded compliment, given Mrs. Thatcher's ideology, but nevertheless it may well be a compliment which is so sincere that it will actually result in the undermining of the quality of broadcasting available to us.
That is one of the philosophical considerations that lies behind the issues we are debating. I do not think the issues are simply whether we should or should not have an extra television channel. Provided there are no hidden subsidies and provided RTE are not hamstrung in any way — and I trust the Minister not to do either — we can wait and see whether the market can sustain an extra television channel or not. There are some indications that it can. It has been suggested that RTE, particularly at peak times, could charge an awful lot more for television advertising than they do and would still be able to fill all the slots, that the demand for television advertising, particularly for peak television advertising, well exceeds the supply. I do not know if that is true. RTE seem to believe that they could charge a lot more for their advertising if they were let. The market is the place to decide that.
All that being said, let us see what happens. RTE will hardly close down or collapse because of the change. If there is a market for a third television channel, if it can be funded by commercial means and can operate in a strictly commercial fashion, let us see what happens. I am not concerned anymore that we will have the battle of the lowest common denominator. I used to be. Having observed the satellites occasionally for the last number of months, having observed them less and less as the months went on and having the choice at last thanks to one of the Minister's predecessors, from a Fianna Fáil Government of all of the channels in my adopted city, I am not convinced at all that there is necessarily a dilution in standards created by a reasonably free amount of competition.
There is no doubt that RTE without competition, in the days when they were a monopoly in places like Cork city, produced a remarkably high standard. One of the common views that one will hear expressed in Cork is that people there who thought they were being deprived of something because they did not have access to the British channels have now come to a grudging but, nevertheless, sincere appreciation that RTE provide a reasonably good service most of the time on most issues. We can all list them. As a particularly frequent user of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission I can list a lot of RTE's deficiencies. Nevertheless RTE do a good job. Their faults are not in the quality of their programming. The faults I would identify are perhaps in their excessive willingness to reflect what I would regard as a nonexistent consensus in some areas. I know the Minister and I have very different views. I believe RTE are loaded on the right. I suspect the Minister thinks that RTE are loaded in the opposite direction. RTE would regard that as proving that they are quite sensible. That is not for today or tonight to be settled.
The idea that if we had a proliferation of channels we would have a dilution of standards is not true and is not likely, simply because we have an educated public who are educated to expect this standard and will not be deflected from it. I am not sure what will happen. I hope our third television channel will be successful. I hope, in particular, that they will be successful in encouraging independent programme making in this country. This country has a substantial body of talent in many areas of creative activity and, in particular, in film making and programme making, much of which feels a little bit stifled within the structures of RTE, much of which feels that it could operate on a much more economical budget outside RTE. That does not mean the new channel will have to be a lower standard or that they have to be either more conformist or more challenging.
It is an interesting fact that on some of the issues this House has been concerned about, for instance in Britain the cases of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, it was the commercial television channel which went ahead and broadcast the programmes which challenged those convictions. In recent times it was the IBA which went ahead and raised serious questions about what happened in Gibraltar and it was the BBC which followed.
The equation of public service with independence from pressure and of commercial channels with capitulation to pressure is far too simple. It is the question of how commercial broadcasting is regulated, not whether it is commercial or not, RTE are to a large extent a commercial organisation and, perhaps because we have a smaller pool of advertisers some of whom would be major contributors in terms of expenditure advertising, RTE are more open to pressure than many commercial organisations elsewhere. If some of our major brewers, for instance, withdrew advertising from RTE, they could do more damage to RTE's budget than a refusal of a licence fee increase would do.
If we are to develop in the way we are doing in the area of television, it is altogether too simplistic simply to denounce the whole activity as a capitulation to the big buck merchants. At the same time there are dangers involved, not the dangers of dilution of standards, the usual ones which are referred to, but the dangers of crypto-monopolies. I understand that, in economic terms, anything over one-third of the market share is regarded as an effective monopoly. If the individual who controls the largest newspaper group in this country were to become the controlling force in either an independent radio station or an independent television station and, given the extent to which the newspaper group he owns feel obliged to reflect his views, his opinions and his perceptions and, in some cases, his economic interests, one would be most concerned about how that would be reflected in a television service or a radio service. It is a pity that the legislation does not specifically and in detail preclude monopolies from developing.
