The fact is, and you cannot get away from it, much as one may sympathise with the idea of enlightening a community in the various ways suggested by the Committee, the people want amusement through broadcasting; they want nothing else, and they will have nothing else. If you make amusement subsidiary then you will have no broadcasting, nobody will buy an instrument, nobody will pay a licence, and the thing will never begin. Those who have got expensive instruments will find material from the other side, and there is the beginning and end of your broadcasting scheme. The question of expense has come up rather prominently. Remember that under the White Paper, whilst the State got all the control that it needs, and whilst we were promised an efficient service and a universal service, universal in the Free State, it cost the State nothing. As a matter of fact, not only did it cost it nothing, but the Post Office exacted what I might indeed term a private profit of 5s. on each licence. What do we find in this case? It is proposed to put up a station in Dublin, which will be only a makeshift, and it is to be followed by an expensive one later on. The station is to cost £5,000, that is, £5,000 of the public money unnecessarily gone bang. Later on the State will be faced with a vote for a second £5,000 for engineering expenses. That is £10,000. At the same time it must, whether it likes or not, if there is anything real in this proposal, vote at least £10,000 for the provision of concerts and for the maintenance of a Director and an Announcer, and all their hangers-on.
The Dáil will be called upon to vote at least £10,000. Any person who has gone to the trouble of reading that book will find that a station of the kind cannot be managed for anything under £10,000. That is £20,000 of public money. For what? For the novelty of saying that we have introduced nationalisation into the control of wireless. We had the substance before; it was not the case of a shadow. Now, we have what is more; we have nationalisation. Perhaps we might get £5,000 as a result of licences. It would reduce our liability to £15,000. When I say we are faced with a loss of £15,000 for Dublin, I am only speaking for Dublin. But the people elsewhere will insist that our generosity, generosity with money we have no right to hand out, must be extended to them, and we will have to go down to Wexford, Waterford—I say nothing about Cork— and go down to Kerry and other places. We have petitions every other day for the erection of stations in every county in the Free State. You do not know what the thing is going to lead to. To say that you are only going to lose £15,000 is, in my opinion, altogether underestimating the responsibility that you are accepting in this business. I do not mind whether you accept it or not, except as a public representative, but I think it would be undoubtedly unfair on my part if I were to accede to unnecessary expenditure of public funds, considering that I have been screwing down the people through the medium of the Department I have had control of during the last twelve months; that I dismissed 475 postmen, men who had no other means of supporting their families and themselves, that I shut Post Offices, and deprived poor people of a living, and I have curtailed the ordinary requirements of the people. And to come along and say lightly, "I do not mind this, and I will agree to pouring out this public money in other directions," would be, I think, a piece of gross inconsistency. That was the main reason which determined me, in the first instance, in removing any financial liability from the shoulders of the State and handing this over to private enterprise. The whole objection to this private enterprise arose from the idea that the State was making a concession. The State had some El Dorado to hand over: the mere fact that it had the imprint of the State on it necessarily implied that it was an El Dorado, and because of that everybody who could not be in the thing objected, as a matter of course, to anybody else coming into it. It is merely narrow human prejudice. But let us see as to this concession. A concession, from my point of view, is something one concedes. What did one concede in this case? Our own experience is that the concession is a burden of £15,000 which the State has now discovered.
If all concessions were of that nature, I certainly think that the State could well afford to hold a cheap sale of concessions, and unburden itself of much of the State responsibility which it now shoulders. It would certainly be to the national advantage. This is no concession. It was a responsibility which men believed they could take—at a risk—and it is a great pity that they were not permitted to take it, and remove that risk from the shoulders of the taxpayers. I think this enquiry into Broadcasting has been one of the most costly things that the State has had to face for many a day.
