Mr. Colm O'Reilly:

I am speaking on behalf of The Sunday Business Post. I fully agree with the points both Mr. Kavanagh and Mr. Crowley have made. I will give the perspective of a small publisher. We are the last Irish-owned, Irish-controlled newspaper on a Sunday in this country, which is quite something.

I will take the financial side of this question. I agree with Mr. Kavanagh and Mr. Crowley that the analogy of the mass-goer is probably the wrong way to look at this. The reality is that people are consuming more news now than they ever have, but they are consuming it in a completely different way, which is through smartphones and free applications. That has impacted on circulation revenues and advertising revenues, which are the traditional revenue models that newspapers have survived on. The Sunday Business Post has a very hard paywall, at a premium price. The move to paywalls is a necessity, driven by the fact that our traditional model has changed and will probably never return. I agree with Mr. Kavanagh that there is an audience. We saw exactly the same thing during Covid, which was a return to fact-checked, high-quality, trusted public service journalism. It is hugely important that we maintain that, but at the end of the day we are private companies and we have to be able to survive by earning money. The model for how we are able to do that is determined by how we are able to make revenue and digital subscriptions are important to that.