James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am going to move quickly because I know we are under time pressure. There was an announcement this afternoon about a new commission on public service broadcasting, which is to be initiated. I am not sure if the officials here can talk to that in any detail. I understand they may have been caught short on it themselves in terms of the timing of the announcement. The Chair, myself, as Vice Chair, and the other members of the committee put quite a lot of work into a public service broadcasting review and report. We had quite a large-scale event in Dublin Castle and we produced a report. I hope we are not reinventing the wheel with this, so perhaps the Department officials would take that back to the Minister. We have heard a lot a talk about Private Members' Bills in the House, but I hope the work of the committee and the cross-party group and the really strong policy initiative from the committee will be taken on board and that we do not have to start from scratch. There is a lot of good work already done on that.

I have a couple of questions for Ms Forbes, and I thank RTÉ for coming in today. The first question is quite fundamental. It comes up a lot in debate and sometimes it is described as nit-picking. I refer to the model that RTÉ is talking about moving towards. I heard Ms Forbes in many interviews around the time of the recent RTÉ announcements. In one way, they showed RTÉ at its best in terms of public service broadcasting, challenging debate, internal debate and not being afraid in regard to the subject matter. Ms Forbes mentioned in many of the conversations, the new vision, the RTÉ Player, online and moving to that space. I suppose I am not seeing that backed up by action and reality. Is there enough funding, for example, for digital channels, digital content production and digital delivery? I refer in particular to the RTÉ Player. We have all had experience of the RTÉ Player and this issue comes up again and again, but it comes up because it is real. I have had experiences with iPads and other devices of trying to use the RTÉ Player and eventually just having to fold the towel and walk away in disgust because it does not work. It seems to get stuck on ads ad infinitumin a loop. Is there anything at play in terms of that? This is sometimes seen as nit-picking, but it is fundamental to the change Ms Forbes described and RTÉ being serious about becoming an online portal and an on-demand portal. That makes a lot of sense, but RTÉ is really far away from that. Where is RTÉ on that digital delivery and what measures does it have to improve that?