Mr. Jim Jennings:

On the point which was just made, RTÉ also has a deep partnership with Science Foundation Ireland and it works with us on much of our programming, such as Science Week, and on things such as "Weather Live", on which the three bodies worked together. We are constantly looking at new ways to fund and undertake these projects.

Scheduling is always contentious, even within RTÉ. As an ex-programme maker myself, I always want my programmes to go out in the best possible slot. We are always fighting with one another about which programmes go out in which slots. There is a whole scheduling area for the independent producers and our own producers. They look at the available audience, its profile, and who might be there to watch programmes. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong but what time our programmes go out is a contentious matter for everyone in broadcasting. We all want our programmes to go out to the largest available audience.

Something that is particularly important on foot of the advent of our new player is that our audience is accessing our programmes in different ways now and it is not merely the linear broadcast. On the recently launched RTÉ Player, we can see the number of people accessing our programmes in playback, non-live, and in a non-linear way is growing hugely, even over the past couple of months.

We have a job to do to make people aware of the player and how they can access programmes. We are lucky that we have a back catalogue of programmes and an archive that is very rich. It can even be seen in some of the programmes that appear on our player at the moment that some of the most successful programmes were made five or ten years ago. There are different ways now to view programmes.