While we're distracted by the looming threat of national bankruptcy, a new set of Stickies has started to rule the roost at RTé. No, don't panic, Sinn Féin, the Workers Party, hasn't seized back control of the current affairs department at Donnybrook. We're talking about a set of ultra-skinny, scantily clad girls who have one thing in common – they look like stick insects.

They're the new pride of Montrose. No programme in our national public broadcaster's autumn schedule has been plugged as much as The Model Scouts, an eight-part series in which a dozen Irish teenagers compete for an international modelling contract. It's been all over the station's website and plastered on billboards across Dublin. Twelve girls, eight weeks, one winner.

The only other show getting as forcefully shoved in our faces is Fade Street, a new reality TV series revolving around a quartet of post-Celtic tiger cubs struggling to hang on to their hedonistic dreams in debt-ridden Dublin. Once again, they all have one thing in common: they're all size zero – or double zero.

The reason for the rise of the New Stickies is simple: RTé is rattled by its failure to hook a fresh generation of faithful viewers to its second network. The 'yoof' audience is glued to The X-Factor (a TV3 import from ITV) or too busy surfing the net to watch any telly.

But the station's response to this problem – waffling waifs – is one which those of us who presently stump up our licence fee should seriously start to question. Both of the aforementioned shows are shameless rip-offs from crude commercial US TV channels. The Model Scouts is modelled almost entirely on America's Next Top Model while Fade Street bears more than a fading resemblance to the MTV reality show The Hills.

So, what purports to be this republic's "public service broadcaster" is pathetically seeking to secure its long-term future by pumping out totally derivative programming from across the pond.

The target audience don't seem terribly taken by this tripe. They're usually dodging their licences, anyway, in their student digs, or they're still living off their parents, who dutifully troop along annually to their nearest post office.

Even as this little land goes rapidly down the tubes, no one publicly refuses to pay the tube tax. A few anoraks boast in online chatrooms about sparring with RTé's lawyers about the legal status of the licence fee, but they're not taking any public stand against the standard of the station's output.

MacDara Blaney, son of the former Fianna Fáil cabinet minister Neil Blaney (who was ousted from office after the 1970 arms trial) tells me that, when he lived in Donegal, he used to withhold his licence fee, sending off instead a postal order for the sum involved to the predecessor of TG4. But even this proud rebel's son abandoned his little private act of defiance when the authorities began to build a computerised database of licence dodgers.

No one this side of the Irish Sea has taken a public stand like Charles Moore, the Tory commentator who had to be dragged into a Sussex magistrates court – and fined £262 – before he would stump up his annual subscription to a BBC which inflicted Russell Brand's obscenities on a hapless pensioner.

Where are the RTé refuseniks? Who, in this land of legendary rebels, is rebelling against our public service broadcaster for pouring so many of its scarce resources into the sort of audiovisual chewing gum which is churned out by TV3 and countless other commercial channels? Where are the responsible, never mind rebellious, parents in this land, who should be outraged by two major shows targeted at teenage girls which can only serve to fuel the epidemic of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia?

Donnybrook's decision to imperil, rather than protect, some of the most vulnerable young citizens of this republic is even more outrageous when you remember that RTé receives €55m a year from the Department of Social Protection.

That is an additional way the luvvies at Montrose are being protected from the economic meltdown. According to An Post, the number of TV licenses purchased in this state peaked at 1,241,000 in 2004, falling back to 1,059,901 last year as the dole queues lengthened and people flooded out of the country. But taxpayers are picking up the shortfall by stumping up for people on benefit.

The traditional justification for the state levying a compulsory tax on television viewing is that it bring us programming that commercial broad­- ­casters either cannot, or will not, provide. When he doubled the fines for licence fee evasion in May 2008 (to €2,000 for a second refusal), the communications minister Eamon Ryan stated: "Television licensing is necessary for the maintenance and development of quality public-service broadcasting."

But RTé has failed repeatedly to fulfill this noble remit. Perhaps because it has never been a true 'pubcaster' in the proper sense – as reliant for its income on flogging airtime as on licence fees – it has always suffered from a split personality.

The 50th anniversary of Telefís éireann's first television transmission falls in just over a year's time and the station will no doubt trawl through its archives to remind us how wonderfully it has informed, educated and entertained us for half a century. But this highly significant anniversary should not just be a time for self-celebration.

As a new director general gets behind his desk at Donnybrook, and in a time of real national crisis, when there has never been more need for a switched-on citizenry and when every cent matters to many hard-pressed households, we, the licence payers, must communicate loudly and clearly to the communications minister and to Noel Curran what we expect – and don't expect – from RTé.

Otherwise, we'll be stuck with the stickies.

Rob Brown is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Independent College Dublin

Michael clifford is on leave