Ms Marilyn Hyndman:

The Deputy asked about our experience of being a community broadcaster. I will take a couple of minutes to put it all into context before answering the Deputy's other questions about the Good Friday Agreement. We put in a bid to Ofcom in 2002 to become a local broadcaster for Belfast. It was successful. We were broadcasting in the period between February 2004 and the digital switch-over in 2012. We knew that local public service television was on the horizon and towards the end of that period we again made a bid to Ofcom to become a local public television service. We were again successful in that bid, so we will begin broadcasting towards the end of September this year. We will be broadcasting on Freeview Channel 8 to approximately 260,000 households. We will also be broadcasting on Virgin Media on the cable. Those negotiations have been taking place with a network of local television stations across the UK.

There are negotiations to go onto Sky's yellow button service. Internationally, we provide five hours a month to Today's Ireland, which is anchored by the RTE news service. We agreed in principle to give Today's Ireland a local news service from the North once we start broadcasting. That will go out to 41 million households across the USA.
The hub of the network is in Birmingham and we are all connected to the hub. The UK local public service television goes out to around 14 million households across the UK. We are all linked to the central hub and it gives us the opportunity to share programming between local television stations. We are particularly interested in that in respect of Scotland and the Good Friday Agreement. There are two stations at the moment in Edinburgh and Glasgow which have been licensed to Scottish television. We have spoken in principle about those kinds of content sharing initiatives, but we are also interested in sharing programming with England and Wales because there is a significant Irish diaspora there and also because of economic and social development and being able to share processes.
Dublin and Cork make a variety of programmes for different demographics and we have been sharing programming. We have broadcast programming from Dublin and Cork and vice versa. We are interested in its being developed and continuing. I was asked about the Good Friday Agreement. Community relations is a cross-cutting theme across all social and economic strategies in the North and, when we put together the bid, it was uppermost in our minds that we wanted to support the peace process. We see it as vital in the national community television channel. There are other considerations. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade provides project finance and support to organisations in the North. Many of them are our partners or we have worked with them, and it is a valuable contribution. The national channel can support other areas such as education. In Belfast, we are working with the fourth largest college in the UK. It has links with the south of Ireland and the national channel is important in terms of economic corridors, not just for the eastern seaboard but between Enniskillen and Sligo and between Derry and Donegal. In many ways, linking communities on the island of Ireland can develop many processes, not just community relations.