Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Ms Doherty. She is an outstanding choice who has developed phenomenal experience and displayed fantastic skills over her career. I can only believe these will be of immense benefit to the national broadcaster. She is taking over the helm of a wonderful organisation with a wonderful history and a very strong reputation. It does outstanding work, but it will be faced with significant challenges and issues in the future, particularly around competition for the private sector. As a very strong advocate of public service broadcasting, I have my own concerns about that. With the changing nature of broadcasting and how people source content, the challenges are great. Ms Doherty's skills and experience will be required to guide the organisation through that time. Given that Ms Doherty is still chairperson designate, I intend only to flag some issues and do not expect her to comment in any great detail. I would suggest she will need to be mindful of these issues as she takes on the role.

RTE has come through a difficult patch in recent years and has handled the situation very well in spite of what had happened. We do not need to get into the idiosyncrasies of how that came about. The management team is very strong and both Noel Curran and Kevin Bakhurst have shown great dynamism in leading the change that was necessary. That is not to take from any of the people who were already there. We have a wonderful pool of talented, highly-committed people who work very hard to deliver on public service broadcasting because clearly they believe in it.

There are some issues I would flag at this time. I do not intend to get caught up in the salaries issue. There is a media issue I would prefer to raise. The media have got to hold us to account, that is their job. There is the media and journalistic aspect of RTE and then there is the back-end management, which has to be done separately. It is very clear that we are on an election footing. I have no doubt that RTE believes absolutely in balance and will attempt in so far as is humanly possible to deliver on that. However, issues do arise. I am sure they can arise for all political parties, but the different parties will raise their own concerns. The concern I would raise is balance.

There seem to be some magazine or feature-style programmes which stray on occasion - perhaps on more occasions than one might want - into the area of politics because politics is part of rural and urban life, regardless. I often think that balance does not exist there or that people are less acutely aware of it, because those programmes fall outside the typical news and current affairs area. I would flag that as something for Ms Doherty to keep an eye on. I find RTE's news output to be exceptionally well balanced, but I have questions about some of its current affairs coverage. In that regard "Prime Time" has improved greatly although it has a way to go.

The first week of the new Claire Byrne show was excellent and I would have said last Monday night's programme was also excellent, only that I happen to be aware there was nothing pre-arranged to balance out the programme. There was a head-to-head debate between the leaders of two of the main political parties but it seems no series has been organised involving Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. That is fine - things like that will happen in the course of events, but the Taoiseach tends not to engage in debate, so that leaves one party out of the mix. Care has to be taken as we enter this phase of the electoral cycle that there is a robust platform in place to ensure there is absolute balance, and that RTE does not move ahead with one part until it is sure it can do the entire series. That is a comment, not something I want to get hung up on because I respect and recognise the difficulties in trying to ensure that everybody is looked after.

I wish Ms Doherty well. She has some considerable challenges in dealing with the outside world. I know she has the capacity to do it and that it is well within her grasp and that of her management team to drive RTE into the next century.