Mediahuis, the multinational group that owns the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent newspapers, warned the communications minister that the Government’s multiyear funding agreement for RTÉ could damage competition by bankrolling enhancements to digital products such as the RTÉ Player and RTÉ News App to the detriment of commercial media companies.
The Belgian-Dutch publisher also said it was concerned that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could compound the existing imbalance in the relationship between Big Tech and commercial media companies in the State.
The issues were raised in a May 7th letter, signed by Mediahuis director of legal and public affairs, Fergus Foody, and sent to Minister for Culture, Arts and Communication Patrick O’Donovan.
The Irish Times received the document as part of a freedom of information request to the department.
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Last year, the Government announced funding of €725 million for RTÉ, covering the 2025, 2026 and 2027 fiscal years. The settlement guarantees the national broadcaster will receive €225 million this year, rising to €240 million in 2026 and €260 million in 2027.
Although below the €780 million that RTÉ had initially requested, the agreement represents the first time in a generation that the broadcaster’s funding has been guaranteed for more than one year.
In his letter to Mr O’Donovan, Mr Foody said Mediahuis was “greatly concerned about the potential for this very significant financial commitment to distort the commercial media market in which RTÉ remains the largest player”.
Specifically, he said RTÉ had committed in its 2025 to 2029 strategy statement to “direct additional investment” towards the broadcaster’s “digital skills” and products such as the RTÉ Player and the RTÉ News and Audio apps.
The programme of investment will cost an estimated €40 million, according to the strategy document.
Mr Foody said this was an “enormous commitment of financial resources to digital optimisation that independent media can only dream about”. The investment will also “support RTÉ’s continued determination to compete with independent media for commercial revenue”.
Against this backdrop, the Mediahuis executive told the Minister that it believes it “appropriate” that the department “continues to scrutinise RTÉ’s role in the wider media landscape and assess whether its activities are necessarily the most appropriate use of public funds”.
Mr Foody said this should be done from the perspective of “the costs of duplicating work that is carried out by independent media” and the impact it has on the “sustainability” of independent media.
Mediahuis is the latest commercial media company to criticise the RTÉ funding settlement.
Last year, Virgin Media, which is owned by US telecoms billionaire John Malone’s Liberty Global group and is funded through commercial revenues and advertising, wrote to the then minister for media Catherine Martin requesting €30 million to fund its news and public service output.
In its letter, Virgin Media Television managing director Áine Ní Chaoindealbháin raised questions about the sustainability of Virgin Media’s competition with RTÉ.
Separately, in his letter to Mr O’Donovan, Mr Foody said the rise of AI could continue to tilt the already unbalanced relationship between multinational technology companies and traditional media in favour of “Big Tech”.
He said the emergence of AI had “compounded the market disfunction [sic]” identified by the Future of Media Commission in its 2022 report.
Third-party companies are continuing to exploit the “intellectual property” created by commercial media platforms “without fair compensation or appropriate attribution”, Mr Foody said.
