Ciaran Kelly spoke about the alleged \u201chollowing out\u201d of the national broadcaster, and his fears for its future and jobs if the Late Late Show and Fair City become the latest shows to be outsourced.<\/p>\n
He is a broadcast engineer in the master control transmission section, where tasks include subtitling and feeds to various platforms. Over the years, he\u2019s worked on Winning Streak, the Late Late Show, and sports and music programmes.<\/p>\n
He was among staff who said the prevailing mood is low morale at the meeting on the future of public service broadcasting. The general theme among workers who spoke was that management is essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater.<\/p>\n
The meeting was organised by Siptu officials after workers voted no confidence in the broadcaster\u2019s blueprint for the future last month claiming it will lead to \u201cendless outsourcing of jobs\u201d and deal a fatal blow to public service broadcasting.<\/p>\n
Siptu members are employed in operational roles, including camera work, lighting, sound, makeup and staging. The union also represents actors.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur documentary unit has been closed down. That\u2019s a big one. All our religious programming has gone out,\u201d said Mr Kelly, who is also Siptu chair for RT\u00c9.<\/p>\n
\u201cNational Lottery programming in the next fortnight will not be happening in house anymore. And of course, the ones we know about are potentially the Late Late Show and Fair City as well.\u201d He said that feasibility studies are being carried out on the future of the trademark shows.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of what we were discussing today was for the Late Late Show, if there is a star in town on a Wednesday what happens is the studio will get fired up, crews will come in, the audience can be pulled together from staff and even students from UCD love coming over. An independent, I\u2019m not sure how they would do that maybe if they\u2019re in a warehouse setup on the outskirts of Dublin somewhere. So that would be a loss to the Irish public\u201d.<\/p>\n
RT\u00c9\u2019s New Direction restructuring strategy was launched by director general Kevin Bakhurst in 2024. It aims to secure the future of the broadcaster following financial and reputational crises.<\/p>\n
Mr Kelly said the meeting was ultimately an opportunity to meet with politicians. \u201cThey\u2019re in full agreement with us that public service broadcasting is under threat by what is ultimately a flawed plan,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He claimed that over the years, there has been a lack of engagement with trade unions but this has \u201ccatapulted\u201d in recent months. Mr Kelly said there was a higher turnout for the recent no confidence ballot than the ballot on the last pay agreement. He claimed there is an \u201cappetite\u201d for industrial action, but no talks of ballots yet.<\/p>\n
He said RT\u00c9 will be legally obliged to spend 25pc of its public funding on productions from the independent sector. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t state that we need to wind down what we do in Donnybrook,\u201d he said. \u201cWe should be building on what we have rather than using that 25pc as an excuse to just basically throw away our programming.\u201d<\/p>\n
Siptu services divisional organiser Adrian Kane said workers and the public should not lose their public service broadcaster and its vital programming \u201cjust because of the misgovernance of a previous RT\u00c9 management regime\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is time for management to park its outsourcing agenda, which destroys jobs and the future of this vital public service,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Previously, an RT\u00c9 spokesperson said it acknowledged the Siptu ballot result.<\/p>\n
He said the strategy was published following extensive consultation with the public, RT\u00c9 staff and a wider group of stakeholders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ciaran Kelly spoke about the alleged \u201chollowing out\u201d of the national broadcaster, and his fears for its future…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,898,282],"class_list":["post-327465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news-ticker","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}