The TV licence fee annoys me. It didn’t used to as much as it does now but I have many great objections to it.
Firstly, the TV licence money goes to a commercial organisation, not one like the BBC who remain ad-free.
Secondly, my payment contributes to the wages of many people who do good work in RTE but also contibutes to Ryan Tubridy and Brendan O’Connor. I object strongly to this. It takes approximately 2500 licences to pay Tubbers’ salary.
Thirdly, if RTE gets some of the revenue then so should all the other TV stations. It’s only fair.
Fourthly, I can’t remember the last time I watched Irish TV, let alone TV at all. I caught a bit of Reeling in the Years the other night, which is always worth a watch, but apart from that I haven’t watched anything. Not even the news.
Fifthly, it’s €160 I could spend better at this moment in time.
Sixthly, before my last licence had even expired they had sent me a ‘final demand‘, red writing and all.
Seventhly, well, I don’t know. I just wanted to use the word ‘seventhly’.
Eighthly, see above.
Ninthly, Joe Duffy.
Tenthly, the idea that you are required to have a licence for a piece of technology that you have spent hundreds of euros on is, when you step back and think about it, more ludicrous than Jesus. Even if you never, ever watch TV and use it as a computer monitor or for your xBox or just DVDs you have to pay this fee.
It’s stupid and instead of having a two day Dail debate about the Moriarty Tribunal which will result in nothing happening to anyone outlawing this nonsensical TV licence should be on the agenda.
I bet Ming agrees.
A story – fat francis , dead now rip – was telling the inspector that he had no TV – the inspector pointed at the aerial – fat francis pointed at the milk bottles – “ doesn’t mean there’s dairy in here “
ming would fund RTE through the revenue collected on legalised weed.
unemployed dealers could subsequently be gainfully occcupied giving duffy/turbidy/etc regular beatings.
seemingly rte don’t make enough money to be non commercial, well according to them anyway
http://www.rte.ie/about/licence.html
as an addendum to point tenthly, “Even if the television or other equipment is broken and currently unable to receive a signal, it is regarded as capable of being repaired so it can receive a signal and you must hold a licence for it”. sort of like government and banks – currently broken, but vague possibility can be repaired, so we’ll have all your cash please
get one of these and tell tv licence people, rte and the shit broadcasters in this country to go fuck themselves
http://www.samsung.com/ie/consumer/pc-peripherals/monitors/plasma/PPM42M6HSX/EDC/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&returnurl=
“Even if the television or other equipment is broken and currently unable to receive a signal, it is regarded as capable of being repaired so it can receive a signal and you must hold a licence for it”.
Like having a dog licence for a dead dog.
I watch maybe one or two things on RTE and for that privilage I pay €160 /year
I watch maybe one or two things on Sky.. but I watch them over and over and over and over again and for that privilage I pay €60/month.
All telly is shite!
it’s not a licence fee it’s just another fee. At least our new govt is calling a fee a fee. Or a tax. Or whatever the fuck they’re going to do with it.
You’re also paying Gay Byrne’s retention fee too, he’s got a hefty retirement fund out of us. I suppose I could handle the concept of the nation paying to keep him OFF the television…
One channel, no ads, no sponsorship, high % public service remit, 50 lids a year a head.
Vote for me.
The system up here will soon change to an all-in-one annual fee to cover both your digital receiver for television and radio, and a percentage will go towards your guaranteed 100Mb broadband delivery, which is a legal right for all citizens. National television presents factual material, it never shows commercials, nor does it employ vacuous hosts to present lame chat-shows, that’s left to the commercial independents.
In Ireland we get squeezed to the max so RTÈ can deliver the minimum. Dressed in designer clothing. Montrose should be razed to the ground. During business hours.
Where do you live Mowl?
“If you have a television, you must have a colour license.”
Why on earth should it have been different prices to start with? It was a typical Irish punishment fee for having something a little extra. Like saying ten Hail Mary’s. Who do you think you are with your fancy things.
“colour television’ I meant. (I want an edit button).
Brendan O’Connotr.. now that’s one talentless wanker. Not happy that some of my tv licence fee’s go towards paying that other twat neven maguire aswell. It is my life’s ambition to one day see that face roll up my bonet at quite a speed. now that’s mouth watering
what about the inanity of 99.9% of TV anyway.
if we all stopped watching it th world would be a far better place.
I have never ever paid a tv licence. Never. Never got a bill/reminder or anything. Really think if you have ntl or sky you should be exempt. My aunt moved out late in life and one day she rang me livid, some man she said, knocked on her door and tried to con her out of her hard earned money, telling her some spiel about a tv licence. He tried to convince her she was obliged to have one, she was buying any of it. She slammed the door in his face, promisimg him if he returned she call the police. She had never known you needed one, it took some convincing.
You should need a license for a child.
You should need a license for a child.
Well, that’d be all my kids in care then.
Are they colour kids?
Well at least now thats knocked on the head the nonsense spouted by RTE that a license fee is for paying for quality programming. That was weary enough given RTE’s Walt Disney approach to news but its clearlt a fucking ‘tax because we thunk it up’ tax.
The Licensing crowd on th’island next door are in grief because shedloads of people have written in to tell them to fuck off and they aren’t getting paid and there is so many that it would be too expensive to pursue everyone so its crumbling as a tax.
I suggest a campaign for EVERYONE to stop paying it.
I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a colour, high definition, plasma, surround sound license
RTE – these same fuckers who let “Beverly Cooper Cunt” off 50% of RTE’s legal fees that she owed after her failed libel case, without any consultation with the licence fee payers who ended up footing the tab – as usual.
”Where do you live Mowl?”
Up the Nordic route. A link from yesterdays BBC site most read top ten:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/country_profiles/1023629.stm
We just had our 100Mb broadband delivery boosted a few weeks ago. Nothing actually changed as the system was already very fast and consistently so. As a side point: a couple of years ago, this one elderly Minister For Communications introduced the idea for the all-in-one annual media licence fee. Some journalist researched her licence history – and it turned out she never had one herself. She was made to back-pay for every year since she was 18 years old, and then she was fired as a minister after being dragged through the media mangle.
RTÈ take note.
Mowl, the problem here is any new initiative is delayed until they can figure out which of their mates to pass the contract to. By the time their mates have set up the company to make the bid, technology has moved on already.
100Mb broadband. Jesus wept. With Eircom broke and all the wireless options about as reliable as Michael Lowry, it’ll be fucking years before we have anything like that speed. 2Mb here and I count myself lucky I’m not on dial up.
Take the Bike to Work scheme. You can be sure that lay about surf kids with Daddies money were tipped off to get leases on shops and set themselves up selling bikes in advance of that scheme being announced.
Another silly stealth tax. Why not just fund RTE directly out of tax revenue. Not that I’m an enthusiastic advocate for that, but it’s preferable than the silly notion of needing a license – the tenthly bit.
Similarly, the duty/fee on ATM cards and credit cards bothers me in principle. Most people would have at least an ATM card I’d imagine. It can be pretty difficult to avoid these stealth taxes. You don’t really have a choice in the matter.
On the face of it, we might look like a low income tax country, but we’re far from it.
Our tax system has become PAYL (pay as you live) not PAYE.
firstly – RTE was established by DeValera as a semi commercial station, that way there’d be state control without having to pay for it all… leading to…
secondly – what or who gets paid for out of the license or from advertising revenue is deliberately one of the mysteries of the universe but…
thirdly – other stations can and do have access to fund of about 10% of the total license revenue… this pays for ahem some quality progs on TV3 but…
fourthly – lucky you can get RTE and Irish channels, perchance you get them on a digital service that you pay Mr Murdoch or Mr UPC for, thus paying on the double, but unlike folks without those options who wiggle aerials despondently in rural Aerland and can only imagine the delights of Jean Byrne’s forecasts, folks who will shortly have to pay more money to RTE for a ‘Saor(sic)view’ digital set top box which means…
fifthly – that they’ll be having to pay €260 for just the Irish channels so understandably..
sixthly – they’ll be messing with the head of the ‘License Man’ by making little changes in their name and addresses each year so that he is driven to a..
seventhly – son for a cure for dementedness and a QVC back catalogue of Stephen…
geightly – songs which will feature…
ninethly – on a Joe Duffy ‘Funny Friday’ programme because…
tenthly – everyone must pay for a telly for the privilege of having junk advertising beamed at them all the time because they are consumers, not people.
don’t get me started…
Pay as you live! Yes.
That post was positively Joycean Conan. You’re wasted here.
I’m fairly wasted here myself. Damn that weed. Time for Rizlas.
If only smoking weed was conducive to healthy lungs, happy productive relationships and fruitful work. Being properly stoned, as in concrete legs stoned and a fit of the giggles is great fun.
Talking of drugs: If enough people refused to pay their tv licences, the ‘stars’ of RTE might run out of cocaine etc.
Much as I’d love to participate in the stoning to death of Tubridy and O’Connor, I might settle for a dose of rohypnol in their canteen cups o’ tae…then force-feeding them re-runs of their weekly cringefests.
Tubs and Jowls..the Laurel & Hardy of Montrose.
If you have any DVD box sets of American shows like Two and a Half Men etc that are a half hour long on TV, they are 20 minutes long or less. And the one hour shows are 40 minutes long. The rest of those precious minutes out of your life are devoted to annoying the crap out of you with ads.
And you can’t say that the BBC is ad free anymore. At the end of any show they spend 5 minutes or so advertising the next show coming up either now or next week, or on their radio stations. So it has to be watch everything online or else miss half the show because you changed channels when the ads came on, and forgot to change back in time.
And some tool wants to either tax every device capable of receiving a radio transmission or lump a tv tax on every house regardless given that everyone is supposed to have a mobile phone.
And dont get me started on the dross that is celebrity.
Then Anonymous and gurny Burney.
Cunts
Bought a copy of ‘Some Like It Hot‘ in the sales there the other week for a few yoyos.
Put the disc into the DVD player, and, between the copyright infringement warnings, the ‘you wouldn’t download a car‘ schpiel, the advertisements for other movies on that label and then miscellaneous warnings in a multitude of languages, none of which can be skipped, it took about ten minutes to actually get to the main menu to play the fucking thing. By then I’d pretty much lost interest.
‘you wouldn’t download a car’ Wonka-vision?
Are you even allowed to borrow a CD anymore?
Has anyone ever met another real person who actually enjoys Tubbers or Oconnor?
I just don’t watch TV anymore for the past year or two, I get the fussball & the boxing on their site or the nice pub flatscreen. For everything else, the net or dvd’s do the trick.
RTE is incredibly shortsighted, they don’t seem to grasp that more & more people will switch from telly to internet and there will be an ever decreasing pool of people to milk for their incredibly overpaid presenters.
Yeah Mowl. All those piracy warning on a DVD you paid for just goes to show that the film companies assume everyone is guilty of piracy regardless. Can’t really blame people downloading films to avoid being called a pirate by paying for it.
But it never fucking is the final one, is it? I could cope with getting final demands as long as they didn’t follow them up with summonses.
Down here in NZ at least the govt had the decency to scrap the license fee. With the state of TVNZ and the shite they show, even the fucking government couldn’t charge for it and keep a straight face.
Ah, but the new tax FG are proposing recognises that not everyone watches tv – and that you can’t police it – so it covers all media – computers/ipads/phones etc too. And it presupposes that EVERYONE must have one of those items so it’s going to be across the board, not optional. Or so I’m told.
There’s no point in trying to make up a tax to replace the TV license. It’s soon to be redundant so hence the tax should be too. Let people pay for access to the RTE site should they want to view RTE programming. Otherwise they can go fuck themselves.
Its PUYD Pay Until You Die tax. The cunts will extract some more even after you kick the bucket.
Brendan O’Connor, Joe Duffy, Off The Rails (WALL) Tubbers, fucking Fair City etc, all drivel, shite, waste of money. We do have real talent, produced in Ireland. They have to leave for foreign shores to succeed, because the talentless cunts here block their career paths. Remember Dermot Morgan.
Irish TV has nothing to offer, even the News programmes are shite. Remember Eileen Dunne reading the apology for the news showing the painting of Fat fuck Cowan on the jax. WANKERS. Watching paint drying is a much better form of entertainment, since I’ve seen fucking Reeling in The Years so many times, I know them off by heart.
If you want to hear talentless shite, the kind your hard earned tax euros pay for, Ronan Collins on the radio’s yer man. Bored my arse to death.
Lets go Nuclear Fishin.
http://www.musicbizsecrets.com/caribou/images/SmallNuclearFishinOMD.jpg
Oh jeez….Oh jeez…Oh jeez
The TV licence…more expensive if you have a colour one…..
some dickhead calling to the door to verify that you have one…
Its essentially a tax by the government on your for having “something” for which they provide nothing. At least with the VRT the (maybe) have some semblence of an arguement that the money goes to the upkeep of roads etc…but the TV licence….christ…I so fucking hate RTE and its shit programming. They are bereft of ideas; happy to rob any idea from the BBC or the main corps from the US.
You pay no licence in the States: With adds you get The Wire, Sopranos…etc (With
You pay a licence in Ireland: With adds you get the likes of the Sullivans, Glenroe, Fairly Shitty…
Oh man…
If we all refused to pay it…problem solved
“If we all refused to pay it…problem solved” – Would be nice to see something like that (amongst other things) happen. Maybe the people of North Africa have bigger balls than the paddies.
On one of my frequent trips (funerals) home recently, I had to put up with looking at what Donnybrook and London had to offer. High quality drivel and yankee-imports, programs for the living dead and the stupid. Surely they would not have the gall to want money for this?
The BBC is a shadow of it’s former self, not a decent comedy or documentary in sight. All part of the dumbing-down master plan methinks.
On the continent, there is a lot (99%) of garbage as well, but the Baguettes and Sausages Do have several TV stations dedicated to the arts and culture. ARTE is a co-production between the abovementioned. I have also recently been dragged into the licence net but at least I have a choice on what I offend the few brain cells I have left with.
Because of some topological anomaly I can’t get Or.T.E. visual and don’t feel deprived
but the fact that I have to pay Montrose for permission to watch U.K.freeview stuff via a dish
grits my shit big time.Especially as the licence fee funds shite that I can’t even watch unless
I am prepared to do a deal with Rupert Murdoch.
Nonetheless it’s good to see that the malcontents are getting up a head of steam.
Only five years to the next election.
The Sunday Times used to be a good read before that peasant Murdoch stuck his rod in.
There are plenty of TV presenters I don’t like much too. But paying the license fee shouldn’t really give us the right to dictate policy on content. Otherwise we’re in the same boat – OK, yacht on the med – as Berlusconi and Murdoch. The BBC is a commercial organisation too. They sell their shows on DVD for example. They just don’t have adverts.
@Sheepshagger I too suffer from topological anomalyitis and the uhf/vhf waves don’t reach me. RTE in its corporate brilliance does not allow itself be beamed via freeview, meaning that for televisual purposes I might as well be living in the east end of London. But never fear, RTE has bitten the Digital Terrestrial Telly (DTT) bullet and if I get (another) set top box for €100 – ironically called ‘Saorview’ – I will be able to get the existing Irish channels plus their all-new digital channels with captivating programming from the good ol’ days. Personally I can’t wait for re-runs of Let’s Draw with Bláthín.
oh… and I forgot… product placement is now going to be allowed in Irish broadcasting… expect brands to be littering the screen in Irish programming as companies embace the new ‘marketing and promotional opportunities’. Slopes… slippery… etc.
Product placement?
All future Fair City episodes will be shot at the airport beside the Ryanair desks. All story lines will have to be centred around being leaving the country to go to, yawn, England (because that’s the only country Northsiders go to apparently). Characters names will have to include ‘Ryan’ in them.
No doubt some Ryanair search monkey will pick this up, just like my prediction that they’d charge for using the toilets (the day before they had a press release about it!)
GLAD THINGS HAVE NOW BECOME SO GOOD IN IRELAND THAT WATCHING CHEAP TELEVISION IS YOUR BIGGEST CONCERN.
‘..just like my prediction that they’d charge for using the toilets..’
Last time I flew RyanAir, from a military base up North in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere, I wondered if the toilet tax had already been introduced. Rather than pay the cunts I thought it wise to use the departure room toilet. Now whether it was passengers themselves pissing on the floors and wiping their shitty fingers despondently on the walls, or RyanAir attempting to convince you it’s worth a few extra yoyos by messing it up, I don’t know. But goddamn, there wasn’t any hot water, loo paper or hand drying in the filthy little den. In an airport? I don’t use RyanAir anymore..do they make you pay to pee?
I avoid Ryanair whenever possible. I never use them if there’s an alternative. I find them contemptuous towards their customers. They push the low cost, low quality service too far. They turn people into animals by not allocating seat numbers so that they can make money from priority boarding. It’s disgusting. Their staff are unhappy and unhelpful. Their seats are uncomfortable. Their hard sell on board is irritating and they often play the ’round of applause’ bullshit even if they land late.
I gladly pay a bit more for Aer Lingus or Iberia or whatever flag carrier is available.
On that occasion I did manage to get a dig in at them. I used a somewhat broken wheelie case to put in the cargo hold, and when I retrieved it at Stansted, broke it further so that my luggage was spilling out, and then went to the complaints desk. After kicking up a bit of a shitstorm, they agreed to give me a replacement on the spot. Little RyanAir logo on it too, which I tore off and put on her desk before saying thank you and leaving. I still use the little blighter too.
Hey Gluesniffer, GLAD THINGS HAVE NOW BECOME SO GOOD IN where ever you are THAT haunting the blog IS YOUR BIGGEST CONCERN.
If it wasn’t for TV how would you know how zips are made……. or how to survive in the wild should the situation arise…… or which restaurants Jimmy Greely recommends in townt?
Riddle me THAT.
I detest RTE and have done so for a long time. The shit they air (Naked Camera, Catherine fucking Lynch) is just an additional slap in the face to the license payer, coupled with the salaries they pay cunts like Kenny and that dead bastard Gerry Ryan. Such contempt should result in a mass of refusals to pay the license fee until something is sorted. Like the beginning of construction work on a gallows.
Jimmy Greely
Christ, is he on the telly now?
Jimmy Greely is on City Channel. He gets paid to go to restaurants and eh ‘review’ them. They’re mostly suburban Indian take-aways with a sit down bit around the side.
I suppose it’s cheaper than spending money on making an ad and buying advertising slots.