Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

I thank the Deputy for his question. We are very aware of the scrutiny, which is quite right, of the money we spend on overseas coverage and the number of people we send abroad. We are also aware of the market in which we operate. We compete with international news organisations on big events. It is important we cover such events, particularly the ones that are, in my view and that of my colleagues in news, relevant and important to the people of Ireland such as the election of the new Pope last year.

With regard to recent events in Ukraine, where my colleagues, Tony Connelly and Paul Cunningham, did a great job for RTE in very dangerous and difficult circumstances, we had two reporters and a one man camera crew there, but we had two people there at any one time. I understand the BBC had 75 people in Ukraine. These are the kinds of numbers we might be competing against. While being careful and prudent, we also need to deploy resources to big events, such as the upcoming visit by President Higgins to the United Kingdom, to service our range of programmes. I take the Deputy's point about presenters working on more than one outlet, particularly across the day in radio and television, and that is what we will be doing. We will do a lot of live broadcasting for the President's visit as well as presenting some of our television bulletins and radio programmes from the UK.

With regard to the regions, the last time I was before the committee, we talked about a new way of cementing our presence in the regions which has moved on quite rapidly since we were last here. The committee will know that RTE has a permanent office in Cork. We have no plans to change that situation and we produce a lot of content out of Cork. We have created partnerships with the institutes of technology in some of the other regions which are going extremely well. Our office in Dundalk has successfully moved to the Dundalk IT and the partnership seems to work very well. We will bring a big broadcasting conference to Dundalk next year. We are in the process of moving our Athlone office to premises at the IT there plus there are other aspects to the partnership. In Waterford, we moved into new premises towards the end of last year. Our partnership with Waterford IT has been very successful so far. The institute has been extremely helpful and it has been a very constructive partnership so far.

I am sure Mr. Kennedy will talk about the changes we would like to see in the defamation law, which is very important. It is very restrictive, in my view, and it has an impact around the edges on public debate. I would say one thing, which is that people may not be aware that, for example, right now, there are four or five political figures here who are either in the process of taking legal action or threatening legal action against RTE in this area. It is an area that we need to look at. If political figures in the public arena are in that space, that is a danger sometimes to robust public debate.