Ms Dee Forbes:

The commercial and advertising side of the business, like that of many other traditional media companies, has been under a lot of challenge in recent years, particularly with the onset of digital and other large media organisations. Advertising used to make up the bigger proportion but that has not been the case for the past number of years because of what I outlined.

We have committed in our strategy that we need to diversify revenues. That plan has been put a little on hold because of the pandemic. We had a plan to look at events and raising other revenues. Having said that, it is fair to say advertising will continue to be a dominant part of our funding. It is a large pot of money to pay for. Obviously, as we deliver audiences, advertisers want to get to them. Towards the end of last year, as the country reopened a little, the demand for advertising was much stronger than we had anticipated, given the pent-up demand for advertising.

Diversity is needed. We are doing that. We are also looking at other areas where down the line we could blend our free-to-air offering with what we call "over-the-top offerings", which would lead to subscriber models. We work with the GAA on the GAAGo product, which is available outside Ireland and in Ireland, for the delivery of GAA games. We have recently launched a product with United Rugby Championship, URC, the rugby tournament - again, a similar offering. We are looking at a number of places, but underpinning the very notion of public service broadcasting needs to be a strong and fair public funding system. We look forward to the results of the media commission to see where that stands.