Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

I thank the committee for inviting me before it today in what is my first appearance here. I am pleased to be here. Social media is a real issue for any public service broadcaster or any broadcaster that wants to maintain the trust of an audience in the impartial approach to news and current affairs. Social media has become an inherent part of what we do around the world and it is a source of amazing material that we would not get otherwise from our audience and also from conflict zones like Syria, where it is very difficult for journalists to operate properly. We need a system to deal with social media.

We deal with social media as a source of material, and as Deputy Moynihan noted, it is critical that we know how to deal with it. It was completely unacceptable that the tweet in question got to air and I like to think that will never happen again in a debate like that. We must have the right systems and level of knowledge in place in dealing with social media, which is fast evolving.

While we receive material via social media it is also an important way for us to put out content, and some of the RTE accounts are quite successful in doing this through Twitter etc. Personal use is probably the thorniest area, and we already have some strict guidelines within RTE. I have no doubt that the people who work for us know exactly how seriously we take those guidelines, and we have recently ensured that everybody has read and signed both journalism and social media guidelines. I have stated clearly that if people have not read and signed them, they should not be working for us.

This is a constantly evolving field. We have done training in social media and I have commissioned one of the best social media trainers I know to come in again in the new year to do a few new sessions. The field is constantly changing and we take it extremely seriously. I personally monitor many of the tweets by our people in news and current affairs to satisfy myself that they are not putting anything out there which in any way questions the impartiality of what they do.