Mr. Tim Collins:

The only payments we have to make are for telephone lines at Croke Park, which are very expensive, and Mr. Purcell would have to pay much more in Kilkenny than we would in Sligo. Donegal, which is also in our franchise area, did very well last year. One of the services we provide to people around the country that may not be recognised is the wall to wall coverage of local sport. My station covers three counties and on any given Sunday, we could have commentary teams in three separate football grounds around the country providing live commentary, opting out on different frequencies and providing a service online for the many people who have left the country listening to news of their local team. The local service is used for that benefit, which is important. The other major external cost we have is transmission, with RTE providing transmission service facilities for us. We are on the mast at Truskmore. It is a good service and we have no problem with it but it is very expensive.

There was a point about upping our game. Our game is pretty good and 70% of the country listens to our stations. The content is produced on a shoestring. I have a mid-morning programme with one person on air and one producer but the equivalent programme on a national station, particularly in RTE, might have a dozen people working on it. We must produce the same amount of content and the same number of hours. We must hold listeners for the same length and they must be equally served by our programme as by a national broadcaster. If we can get more support, we can do more of that and better programming. We have two or three news reporters only attending one council meeting.

We could have them attend all the council meetings in our area every week, as well as attending local courts, community meetings, gathering the content our listeners want. We cannot do that, however, because we are so badly resourced. That is short-changing our listeners who are paying a television licence fee for a service they do not use as they are listening to us. There is a serious problem of equity there.