The station was, at the time, run on less than a shoestring budget, a completely volunteer-led endeavour, perched in an office above a fast-food restaurant in the Blanchardstown Centre. 

At 18 years of age, we were given a remarkable amount of responsibility to act as the de-facto broadcasting crew for shows about local football, arts, and current affairs.

I was quickly roped into joining the board, and it was hammered home to me what our purpose was.

Whereas I had seen an electronic playground, a chance to speak and be heard speaking on air, the station's chairperson and founder put it simply: we were a community asset that happened to broadcast radio.

Our job was to use what little funds we had to offer a platform to minorities, sports teams, schools, and community groups, and, at the same time, do good radio.

That message has been rattling around in my brain for the last fortnight as RTÉ's future has been debated and speculated upon. 

The scandal around RTÉ began around the payments to one man, and is now a question about the future of public broadcasting in Ireland. 

But the question of what we want and expect RTÉ to be has been lost in discussions of loaner cars and the price of flip-flops.

At its core, this issue, and the scrutiny around it, speaks to a fundamental issue with RTÉ's competing priorities on a commercial and public interest level. 

At the committee, RTE's head of commercial Geraldine O'Leary made the point that a €111,000 trip to the Rugby World Cup in Japan may have taken money from an RTÉ barter account, but it provided a chance to woo four clients whose companies had spent €38m in 2018. 

In her tenure, she said, she had delivered €1.65bn into RTÉ's coffers from advertisers. From her point of view, that is her job and it is job done.

But the public has a different view of RTÉ — it is a national asset that happens to have TV and radio stations, orchestras, and online content — and the past few days have exposed that faultline in public perception.

RTÉ has for many decades straddled that line between being commercial and public successfully, but after watching nearly 15 hours of Oireachtas committees in the last week, it is clear that this is what is causing friction between what RTÉ is and what some want it to be.

Can RTÉ survive in the future straddling that line as commercial revenues become outweighed by its public funding? Can RTÉ regain the trust of the public and restore faith in the idea of government-funded broadcasting?

These are existential questions, but it seems that a start for RTÉ would be to remember its own ethos and go from there.