Dr. Roderick Flynn:

I thank the joint committee for inviting me to come before it. I think the reason I am here is because in addition to this being a research focus, I am the Irish rapporteur for the media pluralism monitor, which as Dr. Foley has pointed out, identified the Irish communications market in terms of concentration as constituting a high risk.

It might be helpful if I briefly rehearse how we got to this point. Some 22 years ago, the Irish Newspaper Commission, among other things, looked at the question of the degree of pluralism and diversity in Irish media. It concluded that there was sufficient diversity at that point, that is, in 1995, but that any further diminution in competition and consolidation of ownership would create an issue. Immediately after that we had a more or less helter-skelter deluge of media acquisitions, starting with the UK player, Scottish Radio Holding and Trinity Mirror coming into the radio and print media markets. This prompted the Population Communications International, PCI, Media Impact in 2001 to adjust their ownership and control policy. Under some pressure from the Competition Authority, which was looking for a more relaxed approach to media ownership and as a consequence in 2001, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, BCI, announced a new lighter touch approach to regulation and ownership thresholds, which existed at the time, were substantially relaxed.

Up to that point no individual or firm could own more than 27% of any individual media outlet. This related to BCI regulated media, that is, to radio stations. The new limit was no more than 25% of an entire sector, right across the radio sector and, therefore, 100% ownership of up to a quarter of all BCI licensed radio stations was possible from this point onwards. The BCI's competence at that point did not extend to print media and its new rules made no reference to television but coincidentally in the period after than between 2001 and 2007, there was a deluge of radio and print acquisitions, mainly in the local and regional markets. These went largely unchallenged by the competition authorities, successive Ministers for enterprise and by the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland. By my reckoning, there were almost 90 media mergers between 1995 and 2008, of which perhaps three were subjected to any kind of extensive scrutiny.

By 2008, a number of groups were emerging in the print sector, including Independent News & Media Holdings Limited, which had been there since the 1970s, Johnston Publishing, Alpha Newspaper Group, Dunfermline Press which becomes the Celtic Media Newspaper Limited and Thomas Crosbie Holdings. One could add smaller groups, but these are the main players. In radio, the incumbent players was RTE, Scottish Radio Holdings, which in turn was taken over by Emap, UTV, Thomas Crosbie Holdings and Communicorp Group Limited.

In 2007, we had the last major acquisition in this phase, namely, the acquisition by Communicorp of Emap Holdings, that is, Today FM, FM 104 and Highland Radio. I mention this because the acquisition was unusual in that it was subjected to a full-scale investigation by the then Competition Authority. However, even before the authority completed its work, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland stepped in to announce it would not sign off on the sale of FM 104 as part of the deal as this would have placed both national commercial stations and the two leading Dublin commercial stations in the hands of a single company. Although the acquisition proceeded, FM 104 was immediately sold off to ITV.

The net effect of all this is that, over the course of a decade between 1998 and 2008, we moved from a position whereby local media in particular were largely constituted of privately owned and often family owned independent operations to a position whereby all but a handful of commercial radio stations and nearly every local newspaper with a significant circulation had been absorbed into larger media groups. The scale and pace of this concentration attracted some political attention and in 2008, the advisory group on media mergers, on which Professor Colum Kenny sat, was established to assess whether media merger regulation was up to scratch. The conclusions of the advisory group were that, although it was ultimately the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment who determined whether a merger should proceed, it was the Competition Authority which performed the assessments informing the Minister's judgment. The advisory committee noted, however, that the Competition Authority's expertise lay in assessing the market impact - I emphasise that term - of media acquisitions. By its own admission over the previous years, the Competition Authority was not competent to assess the impact of such acquisitions on pluralism and diversity. I emphasise that the former is an economic question, whereas the latter is a political one. Consequently, the advisory group recommended that responsibility for approving mergers be shifted from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment to the then Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. This was meant to reflect the shift from viewing media acquisitions through a purely economic prism to viewing them from a political as well as an economic or market perspective. While it took six years to implement this recommendation, it finally emerged in the Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014. As of today, although the Competition and Consumer Protection Authority still plays a role, responsibility for assessing media mergers is shared with the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment and, potentially, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.

Since the introduction of the 2014 Act, there have been six significant media acquisitions, namely, UTV on two occasions, TV3, Setanta, UTV's radio holdings and the acquisition that is currently under review. In all of these cases, the media holdings in question have been acquired by much larger media groups, namely, Liberty Global, News Corporation, Eir and now Independent News and Media. If we accept that the media play a constitutive role in the operation of a health democracy - that may be a banal observation but it is also true - it is striking that until the proposed acquisition of Celtic Media Newspapers by INM, none of the recent acquisitions had been subjected to an in-depth examination.