Mr. Ciaran Moore:

On the planning issue, in Dublin Community Television we encountered some of the same issues with Sound & Vision and its application. That damages the organisation. It makes it difficult for the organisation to plan. Each year there are three rounds of funding and it is something of a lottery. Community media is a community development process. We work with partners and people in local communities to put together ideas for projects. We found there was no certainty in that process itself. One works with an organisation and spends six months building a project together. DCTV tried to put a great deal of work into that, but we had a 50% success rate. From a commercial application perspective, that is hugely successful and for a model built around television commissioning, it does not matter if one fails, but we had already done a great deal of work with these community organisations and with different neighbourhoods, but suddenly the funding did not arrive. The impact on the organisation is important, but the inability to undertake the community development work that is so important and to build those opportunities for the people we were working with was equally damaging under the funding model.