Larry Bass, one of Ireland's most prolific film and TV producers, says RTÉ will remain a basket case until funding issues are sorted - as he reveals what he believes is the solution to national broadcaster's problems

Published: 15:19, 21 July 2026 | Updated: 15:20, 21 July 2026 A musical about The Famine is so unlikely that it would take someone extraordinary to bring it to the stage. Step forward Larry Bass, one of Ireland’s most prolific and inventive makers of television and film. He has made Wolfe Tones member Brian Warfield’s dream a reality. This Wednesday, July 22, Celtic Exodus, a musical about two lovers during that turbulent time in Ireland’s history will open for business and a four-week run in the birthplace of the Irish Republic and the first meeting place of Dáil Éireann, the Round Room in Dublin’s Mansion House. Initially, Bass says, he turned down the idea as he felt Warfield’s story was too sprawling, had too many characters. ‘He was trying to be too epic in his approach to telling the story of the famine, and I said, “Look, it needs a much simpler story at its heart and less characters.” And to be fair to him, he did come back. ‘It was a good few years between that first conversation and the next one, but when he came back, it had certainly been transformed in terms of scale.’ It was plausible then, Bass says, and so they did a pilot last year to see if the acting worked, if the songs worked and if it stacked up in terms of the story. The venue was an accidental find. ‘We wanted to do the show in Ireland before we went looking elsewhere internationally,’ Bass says. ‘This is an Irish story and it should be born in Ireland but unfortunately looking around at Irish theatres we couldn’t find one that was big enough and had enough availability to make putting on this show commercially viable. ‘Once you go into opening a show of this scale, you need to rehearse your cast and crew for pretty much a couple of months so it’s a fairly large payroll. If you’re only doing that for the show to run for a couple of days it doesn’t commercially stack up.’ But there was a stroke of good fortune in the form of a conversation Bass had with Padraic O’Kane, the owner of Fire Restaurant at the Mansion House. ‘When Lady Luck opens the door, gallop through it without looking in the rearview mirror,’ Larry says. ‘I went to him about a project around documenting the American football and literally at the end of the meeting, he said to me, “you don’t have anything to go into the Round Room, do you?” ‘It’s a beautiful space, one of the oldest spaces in the city.’ And so Celtic Exodus is opening in the historic building, a musical with heart, strong songs and a historical story told in a different way. It’s the first theatre show in the Round Room and a learning curve for both sides but Bass thinks the public will love the experience. Ticket sales are brisk, with Bass hoping that when it opens, word of mouth will spread. But things are going very nicely so far. Bass began his career as a sound engineer and DJ. Brought up in Sallynoggin in south county Dublin, his elder brother was a DJ on a pirate station and one night when one of the regulars didn’t show up, he drafted in his younger brother as a stand-in. ‘The next minute I was on air and I got the bug aged 13,’ he says. ‘One of the guys in the radio station said, “I’m doing a disco tomorrow night in the youth club, do you want to come and help me?” So I went down to help and at the end of the night he handed me 20 quid.’ At 13, Bass couldn’t believe you got paid for doing something that you loved and so that was the beginning of his work as a sound engineer, supplying DJs and equipment to local hotels. This in turn got him work with hire companies, for whom he did sound and lighting and rigs for events. Understandably school went on the back burner. He moved to London and was working in the music business but then decided he wanted to go to college. Successful film and TV producer Larry Bass began his career as a sound engineer and DJ ‘I felt I needed to do something for a longer career,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t somebody who pursued education beyond school, but a lot of people I knew had gone to college and done well, including my own brother who had done it as a mature student. ‘So I decided to pack in London and come home and study as I wanted to work in television. The jump from rock and roll to television wasn’t a big one.’ When he finished his studies, Bass set up ShinAWil, his production company, to do a documentary. ‘It was about Aslan, a band I used to do sound for,’ he says. ‘That documentary was Made In Dublin and then the next production we did was Popstars and the rest is history.’ Musicals, though, seem to be a different kettle of fish. At the launch of Celtic Exodus, Warfield said that Bass told him making a musical was like putting a wheelbarrow of money through a trap door and watching it disappear. He has dipped a toe in the business of musicals before – back in the 1990s he did charity Cinderella shows to raise money for different hospitals and he was also behind Fame: The Musical, the spin-off show from his RTÉ programme alongside Robert C Kelly. ‘It’s not an alien space to me,’ he says of the theatrical genre, explaining that ShinAWil has already expanded its strands from light entertainment into drama and feature films. ‘They’re different genres, but essentially all production.’ It is, of course, a risk but all productions are, according to Bass. ShinAwil makes some of the most successful shows on television, including Home Of The Year and Dancing With The Stars, and in 2023, the company took another gamble. ‘Our first feature film was a huge risk, but thankfully it’s been a big success,’ Larry explains. ‘The Miracle Club was the highest grossing Irish film of 2023 and it was Maggie Smith’s last movie, with Laura Linney, Brenda Fricker, Kathy Bates and Stephen Rea. ‘It was a huge risk for us to stick our head above the parapet as a producer of a film of that level. When we did Clean Sweep for RTÉ, a crime drama series, again [it was] a big pivot, but a big success and even bigger success outside of Ireland. [Then we did] Borderline, which is the show we’ve done for ZDF in Germany, which we are now working on series two for. ‘You can’t be in business if you’re afraid of risk, you wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Every day you open the door, every day you hire somebody, every day you put a budget together for anything, everything could backfire, but you have to have faith. You’ve got to have good belief in your gut instincts.’ He feels he might get his entrepreneurial spirit from losing his mother at the age of 12. Ruth Charles, Bill Cornally, Ellen Tolan and Dane McKiernan will take part in Famine musical ‘I think people who are destined to be entrepreneurial, they’re inevitably risk-takers, they’re people who are prepared to make change happen, try new things,’ he says. ‘I think that’s something you’re born with. ‘I always give credit to the fact that unfortunately my mom passed away when I was 12. Dad was out to work, so we were sort of left to our own devices and we had to get on with things. ‘We were making decisions very early in our lives, and I think that ability to make decisions is something that we nearly squash out of our children these days. We molly-coddle people too much.’ It has failed him at points – the Dancing With The Stars live tour didn’t work, nor, he says, did many TV ideas. ‘You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs in this business and keep on keeping on until things land,’ he says. ‘You can’t be somebody who lets “No” stop you. No means: Ask a different question, pitch a different show. What did you learn from it? How do you keep going? You’ve got to be consistent, persistent and constant.’ One thing that does annoy him though, is the fact that successive governments have not been able to sort out the mess that RTÉ is in. ‘The obvious thing with RTÉ – and I’ve been banging on about this for nearly 20 years now – is that until its funding is sorted out once and for all, it’s always going to be a bit of a basket case,’ he says. ‘Because no business can operate if it does not know what its actual operational budgets are going to be. ‘It’s just bananas, there can’t be any long-term planning. Until the Government grasps the nettle and sorts out how public sector broadcasting is funded, it’s always going to be in trouble. ‘The current minister seems to be completely incompetent. On one hand he’s saying not another penny to RTÉ and on the other hand, he said it should be more commercial when being more commercial is what caused all the problems in the first place.’ He believes if there was a proper licence fee that was presented and collected properly, RTÉ wouldn’t need a commercial income. He points to Germany, where the public sector broadcaster is paid for by every citizen and so is protected. Bass is most furious about Minister Patrick O’Donovan’s refusal to follow the EU directive to levy streaming companies like Netflix, which in turn funds programming and cinema made here. ‘In France, they really doubled down on protecting their broadcasters and properly funding their film and television industry,’ he says. ‘The levy on the streamers who operate in France is at the highest in Europe, and both the streamers and the broadcasters are really incredibly well funded and lots of production happens there. ‘There is a levy supposed to be collected here in Ireland, but our glorious minister decided to set the levy at zero and we are the only country in Europe to do that. So that’s taken a whole chunk of money that would have gone into Irish content. ‘It would be on the streamers, but it would have been made here, possibly written by Irish people, featuring Irish actors with Irish stories that could potentially go global. We have some of the best actors, best writers, best practitioners. There’s no reason in the wide earthly world that the streamers wouldn’t get value for anything they spend here, but they’re not obligated to spend anything because our minister has decided they don’t have to. Lord Mayor of Dublin Ray McAdam with Brian Warfield and Larry Bass at Celtic Exodus launch ‘They’re allowed to take out as much money as they want, but they don’t have to spend anything in Ireland. The minister said he’s not going to raise the subscriptions for Irish subscribers to Netflix. It’s nothing to do with the subscription, it’s built into your subscription already. ‘As it is, Denmark, that’s the same size as Ireland, has a levy of 7 per cent yet Danish subscribers to Netflix pay less than Irish subscribers, where there is no levy. ‘I’ve never known a more useless minister. He has done nothing for this industry. All he does is give out.’ On RTÉ, a Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media said: ‘In May 2026, Minister O’Donovan published the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill 2026, which includes a provision that Coimisiún na Meán will submit a public funding recommendation in respect of RTÉ and TG4 to the Minister covering the years 2028-2030 by 30 June 2027. ‘The Minister and Government will consider Coimisiún na Meán’s funding recommendation in respect of 2028- 2030 in the context of fiscal resources available. ‘The Future of Media Commission noted that moving to a public funding only model would be “highly problematic” on the basis that it would require additional tax or licence fee revenue to replace lost commercial revenue.’ On the so-called Netflix levy, he said: ‘The Minister has set out his position that he will not direct or allow the imposition of a levy until such a time that he is satisfied that levy will not impose an undue burden on Irish consumers.’ Our TV and film industry is booming, with 25,000 people working in it, but Bass says investment in Irish content is not increasing with that workforce. ‘Some of the biggest shows in the world come here to Ireland, but investment in Irish content has reduced and it’s continuing to reduce, and yet the country’s never had more money in it,’ he says, exasperated. It’s no wonder then, that he’s delighted to be giving new Irish talent a chance with Warfield’s musical featuring a cast of 20. And, of course, Dancing With The Stars is returning, with Jennifer Zamparelli and Doireann Garrihy as the presenting team. ‘I’m very proud of the fact that the nation loves the show in the numbers that it does,’ he says. ‘It’s like having an international rugby match every Sunday for two hours. There are families all over Ireland sitting down on a Sunday evening and watching something together. That doesn’t happen very often.’ * Celtic Exodus will run at the Round Room in the Mansion House from July 22 to August 20, tickets from €39.95 are available from celticexodusmusical.com Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.