Ms Geraldine Kennedy:

I think they should believe us and I will explain why. Ms Donovan has given a figure of €100 million over six years. In the year 2005, for example, in the annual accounts of The Irish Times, it cost €45.13 million to produce the paper. The editorial budget of The Irish Timeswas in or around the €30 million mark for the nine years that I was there. That is a huge editorial budget which enabled us to have a correspondent in London, Washington, Paris, Berlin, one in Moscow for a while and one in China. We had two correspondents in Northern Ireland during that decade but there is only one there now. That all costs an awful lot of money but it is part of the role of The Irish Times, which is to give an independent view of world events as a neutral country. TheIndependent, our main competitor, has no foreign correspondent at all. What one reads in that paper is British newspapers' views on things like the Iraq War, to which we sent reporters. Given that a newspaper has to finance itself either by selling newspapers or advertising, I was delighted that we got a lot of money from property because it enabled us to provide wonderful coverage.