Mr. Vincent Crowley:

I will give a national newspaper perspective and maybe Mr. Mulrennan will contribute afterwards.

On the question on VAT, a reduction in VAT from 9% to 0% reduces the cover price for the consumer, be it a consumer of a digital subscription or a consumer of a physical print paper. The reduction makes it cheaper to buy the paper, which, in theory, increases sales or the number of subscriptions. Alternatively, if we did not pass on the full amount of the VAT reduction, the proceeds would accrue to the benefit of the newspaper publisher and enable it to invest in its newsroom or whatever. The extra money could either be passed on to the consumer to increase take-up or reinvested in the newspaper to do some of the things Deputy Cannon alluded to in terms of making us fit for purpose to service his 24-year-old son.We would be producing content that he would be willing to pay for. Since we have given content away for free for so many years, there has been great reluctance to educate people and tell them they cannot have the content for free because it costs money to generate it, check it, etc. There is a journey. In fairness to The Irish Timesand the Business Post, they are well down that road. The Independent News & Media group has recently gone down that road, but it is a road that we have to go down. It is a matter of making people willing to pay for something that they have got for free for the past ten or 15 years.

On the question of State funding and the impact on editorial teeth and editorial investigations, for example, one can see various examples around the world. While we are looking for support, we are not looking for support in the sense of the Government funding our journalists; we are looking for support that would mean that the current review of the Defamation Act, which has been ongoing for some time, would come through. We put forward some fairly clear-cut suggestions as to how the costs of defamation could be reduced for newspaper publishers. I am not referring to taking away people's right to preserve their good name but to the levels of awards and legal costs attaching to them. The costs here are a multiple of what they are in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Addressing that alone would be of significant benefit. It is not really going to affect an editor's willingness to criticise the Deputy or anybody else. It is a levelling of the playing field without supporting journalists directly. There are measures of this kind that preserve independence which we accept are extremely important. None of us might like being called to account but it is important that we all be called to account.