Mr. Tim Collins:

The proposal relating to the fund is fairly straightforward. When we began to examine this matter, we decided not to consider the possibility of taking funding away from RTE because we were of the view that this would not, perhaps, be helpful. We are of the view that the commercial mandate of RTE needs to be pegged back, both in terms of a more refined definition of what constitutes public service broadcasting and what it, as a State-owned public service broadcaster, should be doing. As independent public service broadcasters, we were also of the view that some State funding should be provided to assist us in financing the element that we are mandated to broadcast under the 2009 Act. The Act essentially states that any organisation that obtains a licence must broadcast 20% news and current affairs. This means that all of the local and national stations have significant news, current affairs and sports coverage operations in place. All of the local stations carried extensive local and European election debates during the recent campaign. We provided 30 or 40 hours of coverage of local election counts with a staff of only 20 people. One of the great difficulties we have encountered in the past four to five years relates to funding this element of our work. Although we are not short of listeners, our funding model is broken.

The only way we can maintain and grow the service into the future is by putting a fund in place to help us to support this element of our output. We envisage that a new fund - separate from the sound and vision fund - would be set up and financed using 7% of the licence fee, which would amount to €14 million or €15 million. We are of the view that the new household broadcasting charge will result in an upswing in revenues as a result of less evasion and fewer collection costs. The previous Minister, Deputy Rabbitte, envisaged that the extent of this upswing would be of the order of €25 million to €30 million. Under our proposals, approximately half of that amount would be invested in the new fund. The process relating to that fund would be very straightforward. The stations would apply to a central body, perhaps the BAI, for funding on a three-year annual budget basis. The fund would be audited and would only be used to support specific programming commitments mandated under the Act, namely, news and current affairs, certain speech programming, local sports coverage and so on - in other words, the public service broadcasting element of what we do. In addition, the fund would be independently audited. We are quite happy to enter into very detailed commitments in the context of the plan we have put forward. Under our proposals in this regard, each broadcaster would be obliged to put together a plan that would be very carefully measured via the use of key metrics, etc. What we suggest in this regard would involve going into far greater detail than RTE is currently obliged to.

We are of the view that this fund would not only guarantee the continuation of the very good work that local and national stations do in the independent sector into the future, it would also allow us to create jobs in communities throughout the country where, quite frankly, it has been extremely difficult for qualified people to obtain employment as a result of the pressures on local media. It is our view that the proposed fund could be extremely positive for communities throughout the country and that it could help to guarantee the future of local radio stations.