Mr. Alan Esslemont:

Only one broadcaster is mentioned in the Good Friday Agreement, and that is TG4. We have been available in the North since the early 2000s on Freeview and that is paid for by the British Government. We are not prominent, however. I think we are number 50 on the list. We provide the same service for Irish as BBC Alba does for Scots Gaelic and S4C does for the Welsh language. We feel we should be recognised as a public service broadcaster in the UK. In Northern Ireland, that would give us the right to be on the Freeview 8 channel and to be more prominent than we are now. That is a big issue which is holding us back with audiences in the North.

There are, however, many good things in the North. We work with the Irish Language Broadcast Fund, and the children's programme I mentioned is being done with funding from it. There is also a contestable fund for young people's programming in the UK. We are therefore recognised at a certain level in the UK, but the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in the North needs to put TG4 on the list of public service broadcasters. It has not done that for us yet, but it has done it for many stations, including the local television station in Belfast. That is the one single step which would strongly move us forward in Northern Ireland.