I welcome the Minister back to the House. I am afraid I may be a little less eloquent this morning than I was last week, as I had eaten and drunk well on the night in question. I reiterate the point I made last week regarding RTÉ. While it is worthy of support as a public service broadcaster, it has obligations as well as rights. It is obliged not to be coerced but to reflect the real and genuine complexities which make Ireland an interesting place. RTÉ's function is not to replace a, perhaps dated, version of Irishness with another which reflects a particular view of the world, what I would call The Irish Times view of the world. The Irish Times is entitled to have its view of the world because its readers share that view. It rarely provokes the world view of its readership. Many of those who form opinions in RTÉ only read The Irish Times and believe that is the entire world, not the 90,000 people who buy that newspaper.
RTÉ is very good at producing investigative reports on two sectors who fully deserve it, the public sector and the church. I have said a dozen times in this House and in other places that the old Goldenbridge orphanage is one of the places RTÉ loves to film. There has been a procession of photographers, cameramen, colour piece writers, etc., out to write about it. Beside Goldenbridge is the worst complex of high-rise flats in Dublin and I know it very well because I helped some of the people there to put together a development programme. What intrigues me is that not one of the commentators, writers, camera-persons, photographers or journalists who went out to look at Goldenbridge even saw the appalling complex of high-rise flats that was beside it, because that was not the issue they were pursuing.
There is a great need for criticism of current mores and of things that are invisible. One of those is the absence of prosperity from about 40% of the population who are either in poverty, or living on close to poverty wages, with public services in health and housing that no-one in this House has to live with. That is to a considerable degree invisible. While there are worthy programmes about these issues, the basic principle is that Ireland is now prosperous and we are all much better off. That is the assumption. It is occasionally challenged by bits of programmes, but the overall assumption remains the same.
I do not want to go back over my comments on RTÉ's extraordinary Dublin bias, including the predilection of "Questions and Answers" to focus on people from Dublin in its panel choice. I reiterate that the Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Martin's announcement of a code of practice on advertising and young people will, if enforced, close down a number of the new radio stations opening up. If there is no alcohol advertising where more than 25% of the audience is under 18, then a good number of those stations will close and if their viability is based on advertising alcohol to people under 18 then they should close.
The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaelteacht and the Islands, Deputy de Valera, like many of her predecessors, has talked about choice and the need to produce high quality indigenous services. Let us not get carried away with choice. The satellite services rarely break 10% of the audience. Some 90% of viewers in Britain watch the dull old reliable terrestrial services that were supposed to be under threat. I suspect the figure here is even higher. If Sky Sports did not carry premiership soccer the percentage who watched satellite television would drop to about 3% or 2%. It is an effective monopoly given that Sky Sports purchased something that everybody is interested in by spending an enormous amount of money. That has given the satellite services a foothold among British viewing audiences.
What we did was different when we introduced commercial television. In Britain that service provides different views of the country and of British life. It looks at different things, some high brow, some low brow, but provides different choices as well as being essentially made in Britain. What we have, in the name of diversity, is a singular view represented by "Coronation Street" first, second, third, and fourth, "Eastenders" fifth and sixth, "Emmerdale" ninth, "Eastenders" tenth and "Emmerdale" eleventh. Those placings represent one week of top viewing audiences for TV3. I am intrigued as to what new choice we have as those programmes were available before, and are still available from their country of origin now that we have TV3. A small minority cannot view the British television channels, but that is all.
The Minister has got to insist, if necessary in this legislation, that a third Irish television channel has something about it which makes it identifiably an alternative choice. There is an alternative television station available and it is called TG4, but that station is under-funded and under-resourced.
This brings me to the licence fee. If you believe the myth of the market, which I do not, then the licence fee is a nonsense. If, as most people are beginning to realise, you have limited resources in terms of technological skills or scale, etc., then it is necessary to intervene in the marketplace to provide diversity. One of the most imaginative ways is by a television licence fee. I am not sure about the scale of RTÉ's licence fee increase, but they are under-funded in terms of licence fee income and that is a great pity. Senator Ross and myself had a motion down for years, in the days when I was an Independent, supporting a once-off licence fee, and a mechanism independent of Government for a regular review and increase of that licence fee. RTÉ might do things I do not like, but if they were not there nothing that most of us are interested in would be done.