Donegal TD Thomas Pringle has called on the government to scrap the TV license once and for all, replacing it with Exchequer funding.
The €160 fee, he said, should not be taken from the many families who live paycheck to paycheck.
“How is it that it is somehow affordable to give every household in the country more than €400 worth of electricity credits, while at the same time unaffordable to scrap a €160 television fee?,” Deputy Pringle asked the government yesterday.
The deputy was speaking in the Dáil in support of the Sinn Féin motion re Reform of the Television License Fee Model.
Sinn Féin is proposing to directly invest Exchequer funding in a platform-neutral Media Fund, which would support RTÉ and TG4 as well as public service content production and activities of commercial, local and community providers, and introduce a legal amnesty from prosecution for those who have not paid their licence fee.
Deputy Pringle echoed his support that the TV licence fee should be waived right away, until a new funding model is implemented.
“The most vulnerable get left behind when welfare increases don’t correlate with increases elsewhere in the economy and no amount of one-off payments will address this fact. The only way we can effectively address the income gap is by ensuring long-term social welfare increases and ensuring that fees, such as the TV licence, are paid through general taxation.
“This is a much fairer system where those who can pay more do so and those who can’t aren’t forced to,” he said.
The deputy also expressed support for the almost 200 staff who work at An Post in the collection of license fees, saying, “whatever happens with the television license, those jobs can’t be lost”.
