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LAST UPDATE | 20 Jan
WHETHER IT IS endless traffic jams, the long commutes or the spin across town to catch the last of the January sales, driving in Ireland these days can really test your patience.
One comfort is being able to quickly switch on your choice of good quality local and national radio stations, whether for the GAA, rugby or football news, to hear about the bad weather, listen to a chat show or even a bit of politics.
Irish people are huge radio listeners in the car. Approximately half of Irish adults listen to audio in the car daily, with radio still the dominant format. These figures are up from 34% in 2021. The steep growth seems to be because of longer commuting and changing family routines after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Indeed, in the increasingly individualistic world we are in today, live radio still binds a huge amount of Irish people in shared sporting, cultural and political experiences. Over 70% of Irish audio listening time today is to live radio.
But the much-loved, reliable and free in-car radio is in danger. New electric car makers such as Tesla often do not include them as standard, preferring to cut deals with global tech giants to stream content directly into your car. They are spending big money lobbying against radio in the US, for example, which will be repeated in Europe.
Today, the European Commission will launch an updated law to modernise European telecoms systems, by proposing the EU Digital Networks Act. Most of the ideas in it, like boosting 5G, 6G and fibre connectivity and trying to reduce costs for consumers, are good and can be welcomed, but I, along with several other MEPs across Europe, am asking President von der Leyen to resist the lobbying of Big Tech and safeguard in-car radio.
We welcome having digital radio (DAB+) in the car, and of course new models will have various streaming audio services. Digital is going to be a major part of the future car, that is without question and mostly a positive thing.
However, car manufacturers must keep radio as an accessible option prominent on our car dashboards, whether on a digital screen or a button, and not buried down in a clutter of global digital audio channels.
In a world dominated by the cesspit of social media, rage-driven clickbait online content and AI chatbots, Irish radio remains a trusted medium, providing listeners with editorially independent, high-quality news, sport and chat. The radio station also won’t ask you to sign away all your personal data like Big Tech.
Radio is also a critical safety tool during crises and emergencies, ensuring people can get alerts and guidance from public authorities when needed without power outages or network failures. During recent major storms and flooding events across Ireland, people in their cars switched onto radio to get vital traffic and safety updates.
Without clear regulatory safeguards by the EU, global tech platforms, often American or Chinese, could become the gatekeepers to radio content in our cars. That will undermine our media diversity, listener choice and Irish-produced content.
We must keep in mind that online content is still largely unregulated. Our local and national radio stations are a regulated sector, which must adhere to a range of regulatory and content obligations as licenced broadcasters, which simply do not exist for online content.
For example, Irish radio follows rules on minimum Irish music content, rules on tobacco and alcohol advertising, rules on advertising to kids and for infant food products, rules on gambling advertising, rules on medicines advertising, rules on fair election coverage, rules on ownership to ensure pluralism and rules to allow complaints from listeners.
Anyone who has been to the US and listened to their radio stations will know they do not have much restriction, even on advertising for fortune tellers and psychics. If I have one favourite rule in Ireland, that is it.
We know how the online sector has taken an increasing amount of the advertising market, which has dealt a massive blow to Irish radio, TV and print in recent years. Radio now has only 10% of the Irish advertising market share, whereas online accounts for nearly 60%. Much of this transition is understandable given our move into a more digital world, but losing in-car radio would kill off the advertising revenue for national and local Irish radio stations, which would kill the whole sector.
Such an eventuality would be a terrible blow to Irish society in my view. The EU must protect our cultural diversity and not facilitate Elon Musk and others in destroying Irish radio. When the legislative text comes to the European Parliament, I will be working to ensure that people who want to listen to Irish radio in their cars can continue to do so.
The EU can’t solve our traffic jams, but it can safeguard Irish radio.
Barry Andrews is MEP for Dublin.
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