Mr. Vincent Crowley:

I am joined by Mr. Liam Kavanagh, the managing director of The Irish Times, Colm O’Reilly, CEO of the Business Post; and Ann-Marie Lenihan, CEO of NewsBrands Ireland. We appreciate this opportunity to meet and brief the committee about the challenges facing the news publishing industry since the onset of Covid-19.

As chair of NewsBrands Ireland and having served over 30 years in the news publishing industry here and in Australia, I am acutely aware of the challenges facing Irish news publishers. Paradoxically, the reach of our publishers’ journalism has never been so great, but publishers are struggling to stay afloat owing to the pandemic and a perfect storm of other issues.

The economic model which once sustained newspapers is broken. Newspaper sales have declined by almost 50% in the past ten years. Revenues from print advertising for national titles have dropped by over 75% from a high of €367 million in 2007 to €87 million in 2019. The forecast for 2020 is around €60 million, a further decline of over 30% compared with last year. The decline in print advertising has not been replaced by digital advertising, which is being hoovered up by giant digital corporations such as Google and Facebook, which secured €425 million of advertising revenues from this market in 2019, compared with €26 million in digital revenues for national news publishers. The dominance of the tech platforms is being addressed by governments, together with their competition authorities, in other countries, including the UK, Australia and France. Unlike the UK and elsewhere, newspaper sales and digital subscriptions are taxed here, and publishers face draconian libel laws which are out of kilter with almost every other jurisdiction. Ireland is an outlier compared with other countries, where governments actively support their news publishing sectors in the form of direct and indirect subsidies.

We appreciate the recent short-term supports through the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, and Covid-19 related advertising. It is vital that the advertising support continues in the short to medium term. However, if this committee believes that public interest journalism is something worth fighting for, it can support the industry in the longer term in the following ways. We need to reduce VAT to 5% on newspapers and digital news products and ultimately reduce VAT to 0% as is the case in Britain and other EU countries; tackle the dominance of tech platforms in the digital advertising market; complete the long-overdue review of the Defamation Act 2009; and reform Ireland’s draconian defamation laws that support legal costs so punitive they genuinely have the potential to put publishers out of business.

In the shorter term, subsidies should be considered for the distribution and posting of newspapers. These are not big asks and supports such as these are modelled on those in many other European countries. The news publishing industry needs support now to ensure it can continue to perform its critical role in providing fact-checked, reliable information to citizens, particularly at a time when such information is critically important. I thank members for their time. Mr. Kavanagh, Mr. O'Reilly and I are happy to answer members' questions.