As crazy as it sounds, I have continued to pay the TV licence fee well beyond the point where it was lawfully required. This munificence is not because the €160 is burning a hole in my puny bank account, but because it represents a civic effort to preserve a safe-house of reliable, accountable broadcast news and cultural sovereignty.

Even to its haters, the need for RTÉ must be obvious. We know what happens when television audiences are split into parallel warring universes. Have a look at the US if you can bear it, or try to imagine Britain without the BBC.

But RTÉ is trying my patience. Like many radio listeners, I access it by smartphone via the Listen app. Just how many of us there are is shrouded in mystery for some reason, but one calculation puts smartphone and smart speaker listeners at under 12 per cent of total radio listening. This is an indicator of the number who feel a fresh surge of rage every time they are greeted by the so-called pre-roll advertisements. They cut into live programming, and that could be six times a day if you tend to tune in just in time for the news headlines. If there’s a pause or a brief disconnection, the service is interrupted to play the ad all over again. Sometimes, maddeningly, the ad is a plug for RTÉ itself.

Yes, we know RTÉ derives its dual income from the licence and advertisements and that there are........

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