Oireachtas TV Broadcast Manager: ‘Promoting the democratic process’
On the cusp of a revolutionary era in broadcasting, Donnacha McKeon, Oireachtas TV’s Broadcast and Channel Manager and assistant principal officer in the Houses of the Oireachtas Service’s broadcasting unit, sits down with Ciarán Galway in the Kildare House greenroom to discuss parliamentary broadcasting in Ireland.
Ciarán Galway (CG): How do you define parliamentary broadcasting?
Donnacha McKeon (DMcK): Parliamentary broadcasting is all about transparency. It is giving transparency to citizens on proceedings that are happening in their name in their houses of parliament.
What we do in the broadcasting unit is build up transparency and accessibility for citizens across several platforms. Oireachtas TV is one of those platforms. Oireachtas.ie streams all proceedings, whether they are on Oireachtas TV or not. We also make our signals available to RTÉ, TG4, Virgin Media, and to other international organisations who, from time to time, want to have a look at the proceedings.
We are in a position where, if there is any type of public engagement event that is happening in the Houses of the Oireachtas, one of the first calls that is made is to broadcasting unit to see what type of support we can give to that.
CG: Oireachtas TV went live on air in 2014, and you were appointed to your role as Broadcast and Channel Manager in 2016. What are your reflections from then until now?
DMcK: Oireachtas TV existed as a channel, but it was not enough to just show live proceedings and then repeat them ad nauseam.
“Although we are not a news organisation, we do look at the news agenda to determine where that can impact on programming decisions.”
Donnacha McKeon, Broadcast and Channel Manager, Oireachtas TV
The audience knew it could come to us for live proceedings, but we wanted to expand the viewing experience and our schedule, whether that be with studio discussion programmes, magazine programmes, or documentaries.
My role, as it was advertised, was to grow the channel and to bring the channel to maturity and become the public service broadcaster that it was envisaged to be within the statutes.
Oireachtas TV is not simply a purveyor of camera feeds without any context. It is a channel with an editorial line to promote the democratic process, rather than just passively broadcast proceedings.
We are not in any way naive about it. We know that at any one time, much of the country is not engaging with us. But that is the definition of public service. When the time comes that most of the country does need to engage with us, we must be ready and able to deliver content competently and professionally. In other words, we may not be what you need all the time, but when you do need us, we are there.
CG: How has Oireachtas TV sought to define its sense of purpose?
DMcK: When I joined the broadcasting unit, Oireachtas TV was embryonic. The broadcasting unit was responsible to the wider communications division within the Houses of the Oireachtas Service. The Head of Communications at that time, Derek Dignam, had a very clearly defined concept of our purpose.
At a macro level, this was the promotion of the democratic process – whether the proceedings of the houses, or the houses’ relationships with European Parliament or other international parliaments. At a micro level, it meant running a TV channel and giving context to the proceedings of the democratic process.
We are owned by the members of the Houses of the Oireachtas. Obviously, we cannot represent each of those political views. The first principle, therefore, is that we are apolitical. We must always maintain balance.
The second principle is that we focus on process rather than policy. That was evident during the debate around the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. We provided an object lesson in how the system works. We were then able to have conversations on Oireachtas TV programmes about how decisions to advance were made, rather than the particulars of the debate.
It can be difficult to follow this principle when the policy is the headline, but we must be disciplined.
People do not want to watch Oireachtas TV to see particular perspectives being demagogued as happens on news channels. That is not what we do. While we broadcast the debate in the chambers, we follow that up with programming which explains why that debate happens in the way that it does. That is the editorial line that we take.
CG: What are the other defining elements of this editorial policy?
DMcK: The Dáil chamber is just one of six sources feeding into Oireachtas TV. We also have four committee rooms and the Seanad chamber. At any one time, only one source can be broadcast on Oireachtas TV, while all of them can be viewed on Oireachtas.ie. At that time, we had a principle – not a rule – that the Dáil had primacy.
However, through discussions with the Head of Communications and other colleagues, it was clear that there was business happening in the committees that could have greater public interest than what was happening in the Dáil chamber at any particular time. It was a practical realisation that we had to consider our broadcast schedule from our audience’s perspective.
Although we are not a news organisation, we do look at the news agenda to determine where that can impact on programming decisions. The most obvious example was the RTÉ crisis in 2023. I do not think it would have been credible for those committee meetings to have been taking place and for Oireachtas TV to have been showing only the Dáil chamber at that time. Instead, we showed the committees in full. Obviously, when it was time for leaders’ questions or Taoiseach’s questions, we returned to the chamber because, in terms of primacy, the leader of the Government of Ireland was being held to account by the Dáil.
It is a question of making credible editorial choices, putting ourselves in the shoes of our audience, and determining what is most engaging for people at any given time.
CG: How is your team structured?
DMcK: Firstly, there is our civil service team looking after scheduling and administrative issues and who work to my colleague Pamela Agnew. Alongside this team, the production galleries are run by an external contractor – currently, Pi Communications – on a five-year contract. They provide our technical resources and production staff while running six production galleries in Kildare House. It is up to my team to give them what they need to produce our coverage – details on the order of business, speakers’ names, and so on. There is a constant flow of information between our team and the production team. Pi Communications also provides an editing and production team to produce ancillary content for special engagement events, our studio show, and our magazine show.
CG: How did Oireachtas TV branch into ancillary programming?
DMcK: Ancillary programming enables us to promote the democratic process, both here and in our relations with other democracies abroad, including the European Parliament. We pursue that in several ways. Fundamentally, we broadcast proceedings – and we will always have that product. However, we also produce content that speaks to a national moment, for instance the centenary of the Dáil, the decade of centenaries, and those types of occasions.
We have built up our production capacity to produce documentaries in house. The reason we do these things is because we want people to have a varied and interesting schedule.
At the same time, as a public service broadcaster, we can also collaborate with Coimisiún na Meán’s Sound and Vision funding scheme. Since assuming my role, we have undertaken 12 collaborations under the fund. It has been an absolute gamechanger for us in terms of the type of material that we can produce because we work with really talented independent producers and production companies to create prestige content for Oireachtas TV.
It is the type of content that gets picked up by the likes of RTÉ and others. Everything that we do comes back to the fundamental principle of promoting the democratic process. If we can do that across as many platforms as possible, including collaborating with RTÉ and other channels, all the better.
CG: What are some of the unique challenges facing parliamentary broadcasting, especially in Ireland?
DMcK: Scheduling is probably the biggest challenge that we face. As much as the other staff in the Houses of the Oireachtas Service work as hard as they can to produce a schedule ahead of time, debates run over, members have things they need to say, and so it is a changeable dynamic. That is the nature of the beast. For the civil service team that work within the broadcasting unit, who are trying to provide accurate information to the electronic programme guides on Sky, Virgin Media, and Saorview, this is a challenge.
As much as you can, you do not want to upset a potential audience member by providing information on their electronic programme guide and them clicking in and finding something else is happening. We do our best to be dynamic and to reflect those changes when they happen as much as we can.
CG: How have you sought to anticipate and keep pace with emerging trends in broadcasting?
DMcK: We always have three, five, and 10-year capital spending plans. We feed in advice from experts, examine the trends in the wider broadcasting industry, and make the Houses of the Oireachtas Service aware well ahead of time what the trajectory is. Then we can work towards scoping the finances required to keep pace with those changes. It is not our job to be on the bleeding edge of broadcast technology. It is our job to be agile and flexible when the change comes.
Even now, I could not tell you for certain where the technology will be in three years’ time. We have an idea that internet protocol television (IPTV) – which we are ready for – is going to transform the landscape.
Television is becoming a more app-based concept. As such, the pivot to app-based streaming whereby you can create your own playlist on whatever platform you are on, rather than a live schedule could be the future of television.
Oireachtas TV must be IPTV ready so that we can adapt to that change. The worst thing that could happen to us is to be stranded with traditional technologies and dwindling audiences while everyone else moves on
CG: Currently, what are your strategic priorities?
DMcK: IPTV and how IPTV changes how people will consume television content is dominating my strategic thinking. On the broadcast side of things, we are considering how we can provide an over the top (OTT) player – or playback experience – for viewers, what that looks like, and how we can move towards achieving that.
On the website side of things, we want to provide a more complex and experientially rich video on demand (VOD) player that can catalogue all the metadata that the procedural system is producing; the names of the speakers, when they spoke, what they spoke on, and transcripts of debates. To combine that with video that is searchable and easy to clip for members, their staff, journalists, academics, and members of the public would unlock the wealth of archive and information that exists.
Key to both OTT and VOD is video. The broadcasting unit provides the video in such a way that those technologies can be used by our web team, run by Michelle Conville, with whom we have been working very closely on this over the last 18 months.
CG: What is your vision for the future of Oireachtas TV?
DMcK: The next five years is going to be one of the most exciting times for broadcasting to date. The current climate reminds me of the advent of satellite broadcasting in the early 1990s.
What we do with IPTV will change how society consumes television. My overarching philosophy for Oireachtas TV and the broadcasting unit is that we do not want to be left behind. We cannot be left behind. We can only maintain our relevance if we are visible and easy to access.
We exist because we want to provide a transparent window into parliamentary proceedings. The parliament will always be there, as will the members and their decisions. In that context, we can have as many cameras in the chamber as we want, but if we are not located where people consume their content, then we face an existential challenge. We cannot risk a descent into irrelevance. We want to be flexible, intelligent, and tactical enough to react to changes and be where the public is.
