Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 January 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 33: Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
Programme E - Broadcasting

9:30 am

Ms Dee Forbes:

First, on content, I agree with the Deputy that we do not have enough content of the quality we would like to have. That is down to, quite frankly, the funding situation. We do the best we can with the funds we have available. Nobody sets out to make a bad show. That is just not the case. I spoke before about our commitment towards Irish drama. We will have up to 60 hours of Irish drama in the coming years. Ideally, if we had more funding, it would be spent on content and on capital, to the Deputy's earlier point on the RTÉ Player. Our capital budget is €7.5 million per year. That number is a result of the persistent and consistent underfunding that the organisation has found itself in. Quite honestly, we would not have been able to get through Covid if we had not had the investment that we put in from some of the land sale into infrastructure over the past couple of years. A combination of content and capital is what we need to get this organisation to a place that is viable and is future-proof. I might ask my colleagues-----

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