Spare a thought for TG4, which has found itself caught in the crossfire of the farcical post-budget row over funding allocations for public broadcasting.
The Irish language station, which will celebrate its 30th birthday later this month, received none of the additional funding it had requested from the Government in last week’s budget.
Some 24 hours after the budget ministers, Simon Harris and Jack Chambers, took their seats last Tuesday, Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan confirmed that TG4’s allocation for 2027 is being left unchanged.
Budget 2027: Does this giveaway budget have potential banana skins that might lie ahead for the Government?
The broadcaster received €65.4 million for 2026 in last year’s budget, an increase of 9 per cent or €5.4 million on the previous year. However, that was almost 17 per cent lower than TG4 had targeted for the year in its most recent strategy document. It’s also almost 26 per cent lower than the €88.6 million the document, published in 2023, envisaged for the 2027 financial year.
It’s worth noting that there has been a step-change in TG4’s funding levels since the start of the decade. Under the previous arts and media minister, Catherine Martin, it grew by 60 per cent over five years to €60 million in 2025. However, the targets TG4 outlined in its strategy document would, at the time, have only brought State funding for TG4 up to the level of Welsh-language public broadcaster S4C.
Leaving aside the antics of the past week and the important question of funding adequacy, the fact that TG4 or any large State-funded body should have to wait until budget day – or even after it – to find out what it’s getting seems absurd in 2026.
TG4 commissioned 910 hours of programming from independent producers last year, spending €36.4 million in the process. That is a complex exercise in juggling resources and competing production schedules at the best of times.
Given the last-minute nature of the ministerial decision and you have a lot of plans that have to be reassessed or thrown in the woodchipper altogether.
After RTÉ secured a landmark multiyear settlement from the previous government in 2024, there was some hope in broadcasting circles that this would become the norm. After all of the Coalition’s messing around in the past week, the need for that kind of medium-term funding certainty has never been clearer.
