Mr. Ed Mulhall:

Thank you, Chairman. The starting premise for a discussion of RTE's editorial policy on any area of public interest is that there is no single expression of it. RTE's output is based on a set of principles which are derived from its statutory obligations. These principles form the framework for editorial decision-making, and there is an editorial structure in place to monitor, discuss and challenge the editorial selections being made to ensure these principles are adhered to. In RTE News this translates into a very simple premise: inform the audience in the public interest.

The political scientist, Jean Blondel, in an essay written in honour of the late RTE broadcaster, Brian Farrell, calls the role to inform "the noblest of tasks" because it is the most difficult. It requires the reporting of facts, sometimes the establishment of facts, their selection according to their importance and the presentation of them with related material to allow their meaning or significance to be understood. Referring to a concept of a national consensus, Brian Farrell himself described it as a living, flexible and loose set of shared ways of looking and ordering experience, constantly adjusting to and affected by the changes that these experiences represent. He agreed that the whole concept of a free press in a free society supposes that any established or emergent ideology should be constantly open to challenge and criticism.

This is the basis for judging how RTE and other media performed their functions in the period under scrutiny. Did it live up to this responsibility to inform? Did it strive to establish the important facts in the rapidly changing environment? Did it provide vigilance and challenge to assist understanding? It is my personal view that RTE performed its public service role well in the period under discussion. Could we have done better? Of course we could.

An expression of RTE’s view of its obligations is found in its vision mission values statement: to inform and to connect with the lives of all the people and deliver the most trusted, independent Irish news service, accurate and impartial, for the connected age. The Broadcasting Acts are explicit in their requirement of news to be “reported and presented in an objective and impartial manner and without any expression of the broadcaster’s own views". RTE's public service statement specifically requires it to remain independent of any vested interest. RTE prepares an annual series of commitments based on these principles and strategic objectives. It reports on these in its annual report. This forms part of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's review of RTE activities.

To ensure the delivery of these basic principles RTE has developed a series of journalism guidelines. In my written statement I have gone into detail on the structures which deliver and monitor content. There is no single editorial vision when it comes to RTE content. For news, story selection has a variety of editorial inputs throughout the day, particularly from the specialist correspondents. For programmes, each unit makes its own independent selection of what to feature, often in competition with other RTE output. This process is overseen by an editorial conference structure that in my experience allows, and often encourages, editorial debate and challenge. It is a structure which operates in a legal and compliance framework, requiring it to be vigilant of its responsibilities and to respond to complaints, representations and legal challenge promptly. It is a structure with clear lines of editorial responsibility. I can only speak subjectively about how RTE performed during the period.

There has been little or no authoritative objective media analysis that I have seen that assists any other approach.

It is worth remembering that there is a vast amount of material in the regular news bulletins and other current affairs programmes. The two main correspondents in news have nearly 2,000 reports logged to them in television alone for this period and "Prime Time" did 120 programmes from 2000 to 2008 on the subject matter of this inquiry, with a third of those on property. I am also conscious of something highlighted by Peter Lunn in an interesting paper on decision making biases in the banking crisis. It is called "hindsight bias" and is defined as a "tendency to perceive an event as more predictable than it actually was, and to overestimate the degree to which we actually did predict it".

Most of the key moments or statements we remember from the crisis period were probably seen or heard on RTE programming, from Charlie McCreevy's budget in 2002 with its supports for the property market to Brian Lenihan announcing the guarantee or Patrick Honohan confirming the bailout on "Morning Ireland". Throughout this period, in RTE news we were just reporting what was happening. That was our job. We followed events as they happened and tried to ask the right questions about them. We were also open to including in our coverage, and to give prominence to, what the inquiry is calling "the contrarian view". Indeed, because of our questioning approach, mandated by the principles I outlined earlier, some of our coverage was classed as being contrarian. Certainly, our economics editor would have been put in that category during the period by other media outlets.

We gave great prominence to the European Commission warning of 2001 and the Government's rejection of it. Each of the ESRI reports outlined by Professor FitzGerald in his testimony that warned of the imbalance in the economy and the need to introduce counter-cyclical measures was covered by RTE. We covered all Central Bank reports and reports on the Irish economy by the OECD and IMF. There was extensive coverage of the continued rise in house prices, the change in lending policy, the construction boom and the relationship between bankers and developers. From 2007, there was a particular focus on Anglo Irish Bank, which extended to all of the banks following the share price drama of St. Patrick's Day in 2008. Each shift in Government economic policy received detailed scrutiny, including in the elections of 2002 and particularly 2007.

George Lee's documentary "Boom" in June 2006 was particularly significant, not just for his provocative statement on the death of the Celtic tiger but particularly for his analysis of personal indebtedness, the dependence of the economy on property-related Exchequer funding and employment, and the real possibility that there could be a property crash. The analysis done for "Boom" informed George Lee's reporting from then on, and contributed to an alertness to these issues across our output. Richard Curran's "Future Shock" programme in April 2007 was another key programme. It was followed by a debate on "Prime Time" between Morgan Kelly and Jim Power on soft and hard landings and led to a period of sustained criticism of RTE, including a number of formal complaints.

There was a journalistic awareness that Anglo Irish Bank should be watched as a story from the initial share price wobble in 2007. In January 2008, for example, there was some controversy about a story David Murphy ran about stockbrokers recommending that clients sell Anglo Irish Bank and AIB shares. The Northern Rock crisis, with queues at the Dublin offices, brought an awareness that international turbulence could have implications for institutions here.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers saw a major shift in the story. From then to the arrival of the troika, it was continuous coverage. As well as the pressure to be accurate in our reporting and analysis, there was the added dimension that what we were reporting could impact on events, as there was an international focus on what was happening here. An example of this was the concerns of the Minister for Finance about the impact of a "Liveline" programme which featured callers talking about removing their money from institutions. When contacted about this, our response in RTE news was to say it was not our role to provide assurances or to stop reporting something we knew was happening, but that if the Governor of the Central Bank or the regulator wanted to say something we would certainly get it on the "Nine O'Clock News". One of the more detailed contributions during the period shortly after the guarantee was Patrick Honohan's Michael Littleton memorial lecture on Radio 1 on 2 December. In it he stated his analysis that unlimited guarantees add to the cost of the crisis and that where illiquidity is obvious there is usually a deal of insolvency lurking in the background.

If there was a gap in coverage, it was the solvency versus liquidity issue in the main banks. Although the issue was raised, most notably by Morgan Kelly, there was little evidence from within the institutions until the information from the stress tests started to be revealed. Had we been able to discover this type of information from within the banking institutions we would have reported it. Certainly, it would not have been an easy matter given the legal environment. In the past RTE had fought cases in the Supreme Court to defend the right of the media to continue investigations into wrongdoing in the financial sector, and we would have again. When we had undisclosed information such as that revealed in David Murphy's story on Irish Life and Permanent and Anglo Irish Bank end of year arrangements we reported it. However, there were no whistleblowers. Even when "Prime Time Investigates" went back to the issue in the "Meet the Bankers" investigation only one could be found.

There are other areas which I believe could have been explored further. We, like other media, tended to struggle to report on regulatory and administrative structures. Second, there could have been a greater emphasis on the interlocking of the financial structures and the implications of this for policy responses to the crisis.

The inquiry has asked me about the relationship between the editorial and sales functions within RTE. In my experience as managing director of news and current affairs, there is none. When RTE was restructured into integrated business divisions in 2002, with devolved finance, commercial, press and human resources functions, the news and current affairs independent business division, IBD, was kept separate from any commercial activity. My only contact with the commercial division would be as a member of the executive board, and the only times we would have been consulted on a commercial issue would be on sponsorship options related to content position within news programming, such as weather and traffic. I have no recollection of any representations or even queries from the commercial side of RTE on an editorial matter and none concerning the subject matter of this inquiry.

The period under review was a time of intense interest in news and current affairs, an interest which grew as the economic crisis developed. The coverage and reporting I have been outlining were not isolated incidents in specialist publications. They were all contained on high audience, mainstream programming. We also know what the audience thought of this coverage. In 2008, 79% of a national sample of the RTE audience considered economic coverage of a high quality, with a similar figure for business coverage. The quality of the coverage is due to the expertise and diligence of the RTE staff working in this area and their commitment to public service principles.

I hope I have shown that RTE did, and does, take its responsibilities as a public broadcaster very seriously. It is essential that we do not just explore what happened but pay great attention to the why, and what is needed structurally and behaviourally to avoid the possibility of another crash.