Mr. Vincent Crowley:

A number of questions have been asked. With regard to Senator Cassells's point on people not going to mass, people still need to consume news and still desire to consume it so perhaps the cases are a little bit different. If people do not go to mass, perhaps they substitute it in other respects but there is a continuing requirement for news. There is an important need to continue to provide it. Our challenge is that it is costly to provide this trusted news.

Senator Byrne's point is valid. There is an increasing number of paywalls because they are an effort to recoup some of the costs of journalists checking and fact checking and paying libel suits. There is a real cost that we have to try to recoup. We are recouping it less and less from physical newspaper sales. It is not like mass in that sense, in that people are still looking to get news content but they are getting it in other ways, as Senator Byrne alluded to, through paywalls or Google and Facebook, which use our news and do not pay for it and then get significant advertising revenues on the back of it. There is an imbalance there. It is not about neutering Google and Facebook. Let them off to do what they do but to use the old cliché of levelling the playing field, they monetise significantly the benefit they get from free access to our content, with €425 million revenue in 2019 on the back of this content. I am not saying it is just our content as there are other things. It is about levelling the playing field. It is not a case of stopping or hindering them from doing what they are doing but having them pay their fair share for accessing content we have generated and paid for through our journalists.

Perhaps Mr. Kavanagh or Mr. O'Reilly would like to add their views on how they see this in their newsrooms.