Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the members of the commission for joining us. Looking at my laptop screen here, I am filled with confidence about the calibre and the quality of the people that we have chosen to do the work of the commission. I look forward to its deliberations.

Fine Gael is finalising a submission that it will make to the commission on foot of significant engagement with local media practitioners, both in print media and broadcasting, over the past two months. We have had some fascinating conversations with those colleagues of Ms Holliman who are on the front line in terms of the challenges they face with ever-dwindling advertising revenue, as well as the slow but steady migration from the traditional outlets to digital.

What brought it home to me was when I was listening to a podcast four or five weeks ago. It was produced in the US and all its contributors were from there. When it went to an ad break, the words "Loughrea" and "Salthill" were mentioned. It was extraordinary. It was this scalpel-like precision in homing in exactly on where I was listening, choosing the advertiser, who obviously paid to be on this platform, and feeding that advertiser directly to me because I happened to be listening in east Galway. It was fascinating, if somewhat sobering, to see what was happening.

Like many other countries have already done, we urgently need to look at some sort of model that supports, as Ms Holliman described it, the production of independent, transparent and trustworthy output and content. What has sustained us as a nation over the past year and a half is that our people have been able to turn to those trusted sources of local and national media, print and broadcast, to determine who exactly they could trust to give them strong, solid and reliable information. We have to back that production of strong, solid and reliable information to the hilt in terms of the work that is going to happen over the next decade or so.

We are now moving into an extraordinarily fascinating and exciting but, as Mr. Little described it, ever-changing landscape. We need to strike a balance between regulating the social media landscape and allowing people to use social media to communicate. We saw an example of the effectiveness of that communication yesterday when we had thousands of people coming from Donegal to protest in Dublin, an event which, in the main, was organised on social media. It is important that such a level of engagement is not suppressed in any way in an attempt to regulate social media.

Media literacy was spoken about at length in previous contributions. If at all possible, will the commission engage with the Department of Education to determine what is happening in primary and post-primary schools in this regard? Is there any element of digital or media literacy incorporated into general literacy? When I was growing up, if one saw the National Enquireron the top shelf of a newsagents stating Martians had landed in Normandy, one could discern quickly this was a nice, interesting and fun read but not the truth. Do our young people, the nine- to 14-year-old cohort, have the skills and knowledge to be able to determine what is correct information? It must be borne in mind that the only time we were challenged by misinformation when we were young was when we walked into our local newsagents. Young people get it every day through computers, etc. Will the commission engage with the Department of Education to see what element of provision there is and how that can be improved?

I thank the witnesses again for the wonderful work they are doing. With the talent and skills we have, along with our exceptionally strong capacity across the whole spectrum of digital, Ireland can become the exemplar in how to develop a healthy, transparent and sustainable media landscape while, at the same time, not suppressing the opportunity for individuals and groups to keep communicating with one another in the future. I wish the commission every success.