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Introduction Since 1993 Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ), the Irish national broadcaster, has operated under a statutory obligation to allocate a minimum annual budget to independent television productions. This requirement was contained in the Broadcasting Authority (Amendment) Act 1993 although it was several years before the proposal was activated. Under the legislation RTÉ has to set aside a minimum predetermined amount of money which must be lodged to a separate ‘independent television programmes account’. Since 2005 RTÉ has consistently spent more than the minimum statutory limit on independent productions. For example, in 2008 the statutory minimum spend was €32.8m whereas the station’s actual expenditure on independent commissioned programming was €75m. The system is managed by RTÉ’s Independent Productions Unit (IPU) – more recently branded by the station as ‘RTÉ Independent Commissions’ – which has formalised the commissioning process, and which in addition to its own budget has its own staff who commission programmes across a variety of genres. These commissioning editors engage with independent producers and production companies to make television programmes for all areas of the station’s schedule including sport, drama, entertainment and documentary. The relationship between RTÉ and the independent television sector has over the last half-century frequently been uneasy and has often been fraught. In its initial years, most programming transmitted on the national broadcast service was produced in-house. Indeed, as recently as 1990 one independent producer described the hostile attitude within RTÉ towards independent programme makers as ‘like settled people, looking out their plate-glass windows at the travellers’.1 While inevitable tensions remain between the commissioner and the independent programme maker there is today an acceptance that‘independent productions have become a core ingredient in RTÉ’s television schedules’.2 The expansion of independent programming on RTÉ driven by the 1993 legislation – coupled with the extent and range of these commissions – has led the 104 ‘An Appointment to View’ The role of RTÉ’s Independent Production Unit in documentary making in Ireland KEVIN RAFTER national broadcaster to conclude: ‘From daytime to evening peak-time, during the week and at weekends, they provide some of the most popular programmes on RTÉ and also some of the most challenging.’3 Documentary programmes are a component of this output. In a succession of annual reports from the Independent Productions Unit, RTÉ has reiterated that ‘documentary programmes have always been one of the strengths of the independent sector . . .’4 RTÉ is not the only commissioner in the Irish market. The Irish-language television service TG4 has established a niche with independent documentary commissions while the privately owned TV3 has – as Horgan concluded – made ‘steady, if unspectacular progress’ since it first broadcast in 1998.5 Yet, even with an increased interest in independent programming in recent years TV3 has made only minor moves in the direction of commissioning independent documentary productions. The reality is that RTÉ remains – as Bob Quinn asserted in 2001 – ‘the only game in town’, and within that context the IPU plays a dominant role.6 This chapter examines the impact of the IPU with a particular focus on the 2004 to 2008 period, and with specific reference to documentary programmes. Over these years the television market in Ireland was also impacted upon by the expansion in digital services which gave viewers greater choice but also increased competition for RTÉ 1 and RTÉ 2. Nevertheless, the station has remained the dominant player in the Irish television market – even in multichannel homes in 2008 RTÉ’s share of adult viewers reached 38.5 per cent. Moreover, of the fifty most watched programmes on all channels in Ireland in 2008, RTÉ claimed forty-eight of the fifty places while forty-three of these forty-eight RTÉ programmes were home produced. During this period under discussion there were significant year-on-year increases in programming expenditure which benefited independent producers including the focus in this chapter, the makers of documentary programmes. The 2004 to 2008 period also coincided with a re-positioning and re-branding of RTÉ 2 to target a younger age profile audience (in 2004) which led to a renewed focus on independent commissions on this channel. In this environment, the station claimed home-produced programmes – both commissioned and in-house – had helped to ‘make RTÉ distinctive and mark us out in a crowded audio-visual landscape’.7 In retrospect, however, this period in the first decade of the twenty-first century may come to be seen as a golden era in terms of...

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