Mr. John Purcell:

We await the Indecon report with anticipation. We were alarmed at the question it appeared to us they were asked to examine, which was whether, if we gave more public funding to RTE and allowed it to take less advertising, a solution would be to increase the statutory number of minutes of advertising for independent broadcasting from ten minutes to 12 minutes per hour. It appeared to us that this came from the idea that if RTE cannot sell advertising, we will allow it to have less advertising and give it more money, while independent broadcasters will be forced to sell more advertising. There is no market to sell more advertising and we cannot sell the ten minutes per hour we currently have. I suggest that if we had 12 minutes of advertising per hour on independent stations, it would go against the wishes of our listeners.

The Deputy mentioned people who argue that money cannot be taken from RTE as there is an underlying point of not damaging the public service. We suggest examination of the stations we mentioned, such as 2FM, RTE Gold, RTE 2XM or RTE Pulse. RTE 2FM received €6 million from the licence fee in 2013 and our argument is that either 2FM should be made a public service broadcaster, or it should not be given any public money, meaning it would have to survive commercially on its own. It is an example of people having their cake and eating it. In the good times we were told that 2FM did not receive any public money.