Ms Roisin Duffy:

First of all, this is anecdotal. I have no degree in statistics, but this is what we sense is actually needed here. When we talk about a year-long monitoring project, we are probably looking at radio because we are still very much a talk-radio nation. We still listen to radio. We get joint national listenership research, JNLR, figures every year for radio programmes, which give us some insight into what are the most influential programmes. I suspect many of them would be in news and current affairs across the island. That is one way of determining what those programmes ought to be.

Another way is to look at focus groups and see what comes out of that. Again, there are people with more knowledge than I have on how we go about that. However, the first thing is to identify what we are going to monitor and then draw up a way of monitoring it. There are many examples of how to do that. I will again mention 50:50 The Equality Project in the BBC, which has a monitoring spreadsheet, for want of a better word, at programme level, which could be looked at to put in place a proper statistical way of monitoring women on air and what is and is not news critical. You could then count a number of outcomes such as the total in terms of gender and the bit that is omitted. If, for instance, the Taoiseach happens to be a man and someone is doing a story on something in which the Taoiseach is the central speaker, there would be some other data that would tell us that, if you know what I mean. Again, I am not the person who can give the committee that kind of information but certainly, I think it would have to be radio.

We have done some preparatory work in looking at the mechanics of this, for instance, looking at artificial intelligence to help collect data for us. We are some way down a road in that regard but again, it is dealing with universities. We have not come to a clear conclusion. We are aware that the project is too big for us. We are a small voluntary board. We are doing a lot of stuff but we know that without that central piece, we will continue to paper over the cracks, as opposed to actually engendering change as a society. That is what I would say.

Even in the discussion today, Ms Joyce said Traveller women need to be in that process as a particular group. That is giving us more cause for thought and that is really important. There is a way to go on this but it requires the State to do it and to bring expertise from a number of areas to bear on that. We would be very happy to be involved, clearly, because we have very strong views on the whole thing. There are a number of expert groupings we need to bring together, however. We need to have the possibility and the funding to make it work. It is absolutely essential, however. Otherwise, we continue to whistle in the dark.