Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being late. I was attending the Chamber for another debate. Everyone in the Oireachtas agrees that we need to support content creation in RTE and the commercial, independent broadcasters. We value, as Mr. Larry Bass said, the fact that five nights a week we have proper debate from our broadcasters and we want to protect and advance that. I agree that it is not a question of RTE versus the other broadcasters or even print media as well. In our earlier meeting with the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and the Department, some interesting figures were set out. I understand that approximately €330 million in advertising revenue is now going to the likes of Google and Facebook. Is Facebook a broadcaster in some way? What is its role in this whole story of how we support content creators? Similarly, as Professor Rafter said, there is a significant volume of money going to the cable companies or satellite broadcasters who can insert advertising without any regulation here. They are in this picture rather than it just being a fight internally among content producers in the Irish broadcasting industry.

I would be interested to hear reflections on a view set out at our previous meeting. While there are marginal changes we need to make on the level of evasion and in perhaps imposing a charge on some of the cable providers or other telecommunications companies to cover the cost, it may be time to look at a change in the system itself rather than to continue to tie up loose ends. I do not know exactly what mechanism would be involved and whether one would tie it to a property charge so that it was easier to collect or if it would be part of some other collection system. Do any of the witnesses have a perspective on a forum early in the new year to look at those options in an informal way? It would not just be here in the committee where it is hard to do it but would rather be a way to informally bring together different industry participants to look at options in that slightly more radical assessment of how we fund content providers rather than just seeing it as a marginal change to the current system. That is one of the processes the committee can initiate in conjunction with the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and the Department. It is to think slightly outside the box.