RTÉ TV cuts: Fair City dropping to three nights and Young Offenders air date pushed to 2025
Jock (Chris Walley) and Conor (Alex Murphy) in The Young Offenders. Its next season has been pushed to 2025
Fair City and The Young Offenders are among RTÉ’s entertainment offerings affected by a minimum of €10 million in cuts to expenditure planned for next year, the broadcaster has confirmed in a statement.
Deputy Director General Adrian Lynch told staff in an email that these cuts were necessary to address "immediate and significant financial challenges".
The cuts and deferrals outlined by the broadcaster will encompass both the production of in-house programmes and the timing of broadcast of some commissioned and co-produced content.
Fair City's schedule will be cut from four nights per week to three nights from January 4 which will allow for a pause in production in July and August.
"We will continue to produce four episodes per week but will air three,” the email stated.
The transmission of Young Offenders will be deferred until 2025 and production of a third season of The Money List will also be deferred until 2025. However, the second season of The Money List, produced in 2023, will air next year.
Other cuts include a reduction in the budget for acquired programmes next year and additional savings will be delivered through production savings in News and Current Affairs and Sport.
Lynch said that RTÉ's overall running costs will rise in 2024, which he described as a "challenging year" for the organisation. These television deferrals will aim to reduce planned expenditure by a minimum of €10m, while making available the production resources required to deliver the Olympic Games, the European Football Championships, local and European elections, and other special events.
The broadcaster also identified a continued decline in sales of TV licences as an additional cause for concern and added commercial revenue is projected to be broadly level year-on-year.
Additional measures include a voluntary exit programme to reduce staff by 40, funded by the 2017 land sale proceeds. RTÉ will continue its freeze on recruitment and maintain tight controls on discretionary spend, the statement added.
"With the launch of the new direction outline plan, my hope, as I have said before, is that we will enter 2025 armed with a robust strategy that makes the best use of the monies available to fund our national media service, monies we will invest as wisely and strategically as possible to improve the invaluable contribution of public service media to life in Ireland," Lynch said. "Those monies, of course, depend upon a decision on the future sustainable funding of public service media in Ireland.”
