Mr. Frank Mulrennan:

To address Deputy Cannon's point on the migration, I so happened to be looking at The Connaught Telegraphthe day before yesterday. It had 870,000 unique visitors for the month of October and 1.3 million page impressions. It is not a particularly big newspaper. It has four or five journalists but they are avidly focused on 24-7 journalism. Before the newspaper appears in the shops on a Tuesday morning, Mr. Tom Kelly and the staff are ready with copy. This is particularly the case with a very important event coming up this Saturday evening. We are now local news publishers; we are not local newspapers any more. We have to be. The Deputy mentioned The Washington Post, The Irish Timesand the Business Post. What local newspapers lack is scale. We are not going to have the scale to develop a remunerative paywall model, and that is where the State funding comes in. We are commercial organisations. We are very good at managing our costs. In fact, Celtic Media Group, but also other local newspapers, would not have come through 2020 without the support of its staff, so many whom have made salary sacrifices, but we do not have the scale to survive in an era of paywalls. That is where State funding comes in.

On the dangers of being funded by the Government and not holding it to task, I do not see this as a significant risk because I do not regard the funding as significant compared with overall turnover. Without being facetious, I contend that our first job is to stay in business, and that is why we are here today.