Dr. Roderick Flynn:

It is a good question and I wish I had a neat answer to it. The BAI is a regulator and it is also a funder, as things currently stand. How the Future of Media Commission envisages the new commission sees that role being extended, but in a way that is much more problematic. At the moment, the BAI is the administrator of the sound and vision fund. Some 7% of the licence fee is top-sliced for that and is given to the BAI to in turn distribute to any broadcaster on the island of Ireland that is producing public service content. The way that system works is that an applicant says that he or she has a piece a content that is either for radio or for TV and asks if it is worthy of funding. It has done some really good work. TG4 probably relied on it for quite a long time. It has put some great work into the Irish cinema, as a matter of fact.

One enters into a slightly different realm when one talks about a body that might be funding news and current affairs, however. The BAI sound and vision fund has, as Mr. Dooley points out, prohibited from doing so up to this stage. It brings up two issues, one of which is a practical one. News and current affairs work on a 24-hour cycle. We cannot have journalists wandering in and asking if it is okay to cover a story and whether the commission will fund it. That will not work; it will have to be a completely different system. Second, the nature of the content is different. It is more politically significant on a day-to-day basis.

It is in that context that I should state an interest here. I have been employed as a consultant to assess the sound and vision scheme in the past, when we spoke with recipient producers who are broadly happy with the idea that the BAI would administer the sound and vision scheme. It was specifically suggested that perhaps Screen Ireland might take that over instead. On the whole, producers said that they would prefer if it were to stay with the BAI because it gives them some choices. If Screen Ireland says no to something, for instance, maybe the BAI would say yes. However, it is a different situation when one comes to news and current affairs. There, I do think it will be an independent body. What that will be I do not know. It may be a media training body but the conflict of interest seems significant here, because this is also the body that looks after broadcasting complaints. Therefore, the body might fund a piece of work that it then has to adjudicate on as the complaints commission. This seems very problematic and I would take that particular aspect out of it and set it up separately. Nonetheless, we are where we are for right now.