Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The main one relates to the consultancy to carry out an economic survey of the contribution of commercial advertising. The Deputy knows that we are in the middle of looking at the BAI report and other work that has been done on the funding of public service broadcasting. On the one hand, the Deputy has pointed to less revenue coming in from the television licence as a result of the decision to which he referred. On the other hand, there has been a significant fall off in revenue from commercial advertising. In terms of planning for the future, we must make some assessment about commercial revenue in the future because we now have more and more channels beaming into this country, sucking out advertising revenue and not really making any contribution to the State. We live cheek by jowl with a larger country with whom we share a language. We have an almost unique problem in the sense that these channels target advertising to our audience but the economic return to Ireland is minimal.