Last year RTÉ dropped their spend on children's TV (AKA Young People's Programming) by 25%. The issues surrounding the problems that exists for RTÉ's Sheila DeCourcy when budgeting for Children's programming have yet to be address by the national broadcaster. It's hard to now who to blame at RTÉ for its short changing of children's productions. But someone in RTÉ is to blame, the blame lies completely and utterly at the feet of the national broadcaster.

Last year RTÉ announce that it was to outsource children's TV from Independent producers. There is nothing wrong with this, RTÉ have commitments to independent producers across the country.

However, RTÉ also suggested that they were committed to the current level of spending for Children's productions. No media outlets asked the very simple question, what are your current levels of spending for Children's productions? In 2015 it had been nearly E10 million.

RTÉ slashed their budget for children's programming by 25% in 2016, and they are committed to retaining this low level of funding, not increasing it but retaining this phenomenally low level of production.

RTÉ does not have a tradition of spending money on children's programming. Even at the height of the boom in 2007 RTÉ spent just E17 million on children's programming. A decade later RTÉ plan to spend less than half this amount on children's productions.

The commitment that RTÉ gave in 2016 to retain its budget for children's programming amounted to a commitment to retaining less than 2% of its budget on Children's programming, while at the same time increasing its fees to its stars by 10%.

And just to put the low level of funding in context, Director General Dee Forbes stated "The Total top 10 presenter earnings for 2014 represents less than 1% of RTÉ's total operating costs in 2014". In other words "sure we spend a pittance on presenter fees, its not a big deal".

RTÉ have a mountain to climb to get people on board for their planned changes, but they seem to be eating Christmas dinner as they wait to set out on that climb.