Over the weekend, I received with disbelief a letter from “Upfront with Katie Hannon” of RTÉ to inform me that I was not invited to be a member of their panel of candidates to help voters pick their preferred candidate for the role of executive mayor of Limerick.

This is intended to be the only RTÉ televised debate on the Limerick mayoral election even though tens of thousands of Limerick voters pay licence fees to support RTÉ every year. I, along with 6 others, are being invited merely to be in the audience and offered a 60 seconds contribution while the other RTÉ chosen 8 competitor party candidates will have most of an hour to discuss issues.

The sad truth is that Katie Hannon, her team - and more importantly the people of Limerick - have been let down by this ridiculous, deeply flawed and exclusionary process, imposed by RTÉ top brass. The voice of independent candidates like me who have never been a member of a political party and therefore can put Limerick above party politics and rules should not be silenced in this way.

RTÉ has admitted to my campaign that they failed completely to consider the unique, first-time nature of the election of a Mayor for all of Limerick, where being an independent -- being able to work with ALL of the parties -- would be an obvious advantage.

Instead, the self-appointed RTÉ 'steering group', sitting in Dublin, unthinkingly applied exactly the same rules as for the multi-seat European Parliament elections -- which are totally different in nature to this new contest. Those rules are for an election to select politicians to represent their constituencies in a parliament where party politics is very important.

RTÉ also manifestly ignored two of their very own criteria to ensure “diversity of political perspectives” (itself a flawed criteria for a largely non-political role) and “current support as reflected in opinion polls” - both of which would have clearly justified my inclusion.

If RTÉ with its huge budget had simply conducted an opinion poll it would have confirmed the reason that it is unconscionable to exclude the bookies’ even-money favourite for the election, and include candidates whose chances are ranked at 100/1.

The views now being excluded are those of the only candidate with the completely different perspective coming from my extensive budgetary, policy and executive experience in both the public and private sectors. Equally, they are excluding the only candidate in the race who led the campaign for the ‘Yes' vote in the plebiscite of 5 years ago, and who - in a touch of irony - has been invited by RTÉ to speak on this subject over the years.

As I have repeated over and over, a message echoed by many of the other candidates, the mayor of Limerick role is an executive role with massive executive responsibility over a budget in excess of a billion euros and over 1500 staff and significant strategic policy responsibility. It is a role like no other in Irish elections. It therefore needs a different debate for voters to understand both the executive demands of the role and the suitability of the candidates to serve as that mayor.

Moran added “The exclusion of independent candidates, like myself, means that Katie Hannon's programme is now stacked in order to give the political parties an unfair advantage in the election and will not fulfil the public service role of RTE for the voters of Limerick.

It now means that the other debate tomorrow night at TUS will be the only real and fair opportunity that Limerick voters will have to compare the candidates.

This is not the first time that RTÉ management has shown casual contempt for Limerick. This is the same mentality that tried to close down Lyric FM in Limerick – against which I fought vigorously at the time, a decision they had proposed presumably to save money to pay for the many governance and financial failings, about which we have read so much in recent times.

If I am elected Mayor, I will certainly be summoning the Chair of RTÉ to Limerick, together with whoever was responsible for this decision to ensure they do better for Limerick in the future.” 20th May, 2024.

Ends

Below is the letter received by John Moran from RTÉ: