Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----and RTÉ and all the rest of it. The Minister's predecessor, former Deputy Pat Rabbitte, talked about only people in caves not having some form of such things and then we got the celebrated cave tax, as was proposed. If we are being honest about it, there is a very simple mechanism, which is to impose a sum per household regardless of whether they have a big yoke up on the wall or are looking at laptops around the house, however they are looking at this material. It should be possible to extend it to bedrooms in hotels or something like that. How many hotels would let rooms without making broadcasting available in them? We know what the catchment area for the licence fee is. The Minister will be loath at this stage to pull the carpet out from under An Post and take €12 million from it but it is largely wasted money. We could adjust the local property tax and collect the same amount of money.

There is another point on which I would like some information from the Minister. We are inundated, as we drive between this place and where we live, with advertisements telling us about paying the licence fee and all the rest of it. The ads are getting more sophisticated, humorous and amusing to try to keep us interested. Does RTÉ provide that advertising free? Does An Post pay for it? Is it a subsidy to RTÉ? I think the Minister's Department pays for the advertising on RTÉ that tries to persuade people to buy their licences. It is ridiculous to urge people to do what one could do by pressing a few buttons on a computer. It would be simple to extract information from the system using Revenue's local property tax system.

I will return to the multiple dwelling issues. There are electricity connections too. One can work out fairly quickly what a household would owe that way. We could do it instead of procrastinating and establishing working groups to consider it. It is a year since I suggested it here. Surely the Minister can come up with a "Yea" or "Nay" to it and say it is the sensible way to deal with it.