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

An interesting thing for me came out of the forum. I have a simple thought in terms of how we pinch this investment in broadcasting - although "broadcasting" is the wrong word because we are referring to media.

One of the strongest arguments coming out of our event forum on Friday was that this is an industrial development strategy. This is because we want to be good in the independent sector in particular and in the whole creative sector as well.

We have every reason to be good at it. As I said, we have an independent, high-quality journalism, media, current affairs and news system. TG4 and others have done much to start a nascent independent production sector. It is very much an industrial strategy and it seems that this is one of the political arguments to support broadcasting. Obviously, there are the democratic and other aspects to having a free and local press. In that regard, I know that the previous director general, Noel Curran, had very much opened the possibility of opening up the RTE archives to Irish industry, specifically the Irish creative sector, as one part of a new and ongoing strategy. If it were possible to fund RTE more securely, would that still be considered one of the possibilities in the context of the strategy that might be prepared? If so, it seems that an open-access archive system would go a long way towards supporting all independent creators.

I wish to return to sports rights but in the context of a creative industrial strategy. I would be interested to know how successful RTE's GAAGO has been. I do not know what the figures are, and this is going into the other issue of whether or not one pays for TV sport, but it seems that putting GAAGO out internationally as a free service on an international player would fit into our national strategy and would justify much of our expenditure on some broadcasting if these kinds of games were available free to air globally. This would form part of an industrial enterprise strategy, which is one of the most important things we need to work on.