As reported earlier today, the national broadcaster confirmed almost 9 acres of land has gone on sale for €75M in the form of Project Montrose. Following this, Forbes addressed staff this morning to discuss the implications of this and further restructuring.
The approximately 200 jobs will be accounted for through both redundancy and voluntary retirement, in a bid to reduce costs.
The €2.8M deficit shown in the 2015 RTÉ Annual Report, there has a continued dropped in licence fee and commercial income and a €10M additional loss in advertising income, due to both Brexit and a limitation on spending.
In addition to addressing RTÉ’s present deficit Forbes confirmed today the funds from the sale of the land in Donnybrook, Dublin 4 will also go towards areas in need of improvement, such as technology.
RTÉ are pushing to increase the licence fee to what Forbes has broken down to 40c a day, before drawing a comparison to other European markets:
Dee Forbes, Director General, RTÉ:
"Quite honestly, I think it should be double that. If you look to places like the Scandinavian markets, where their licence fee is over double what we're paying here, you see what they're getting for that, the content is singing...The more money we have to play with content, the more we can do."
This emphasis on content follows the announcement last November that the broadcaster would outsource all young people’s programming to the independent sector, again in a bid to reduce costs.
Dee Forbes was appointed as Director General of RTÉ this time last year, replacing Noel Curran. Preceding this she held the position of President & Managing Director of Discovery Networks Northern Europe.
As previously reported on IFTN this morning, Savills Ireland are handing the sale, with Mark Reynolds at the helm of the project. Following the rezoning changes of 2013, Savills have confirmed potential purchasers are eligible to apply for planning permission for up to 500 residential units.