Mr. John Purcell:

I thank the Chair. I thank the Cathaoirleach of the Seanad, Senator Mark Daly, for having us here today. We are delighted. I also thank Mr. Byrne and many of my themes will be similar to his. Resources, sustainability and viability are the things that will make sure we have a future. I am delighted to be joined by colleagues representing local, national and regional stations, all of whom are members of the IBI. Hopefully there will be a chance to talk to some of them later. We have people from the north, south, east and west. On our listenership, approximately 3.1 million people tune in each week to the stations we represent. It is important to put that in context. All too often the debate surrounds social media but not everyone is stuck in social media every day. The facts about media consumption may be surprising. Recent research by Ipsos MRBI shows that 78% of the population listen to radio every week, and 34% of the population spend time on Facebook, 30% on Instagram, 12% on TikTok and, if Mr. Musk is listening, only 10% of the population use Twitter. The average amount of time spent listening to radio daily is 4.3 hours. We are not complacent and we recognise the challenges we have in retaining and growing our listenership, particularly among younger demographics, but we feel we are performing better than we are often given credit for.

We see the glass as half full rather than half empty. We face enormous pressures on our sector. We got through Covid-19 well but we are perhaps entering a more dangerous stage now. My colleague Mr. McManamy will talk in quite stark detail about the pressures facing local stations.

The debate on radio and the media in general is very important to our society, democracy, culture and identity. I will talk a bit about future funding schemes for radio; what we learned from Covid-19; and, when we have viability and sustainability, how we can contribute to a vibrant Ireland. We would like to thank once again the Government and politicians for their support during Covid-19 and we learned quite a lot about funding from that. It is essential in the future that any funding schemes have an appropriate element of the funding ring-fenced for radio. The design of schemes is very important and they need to be fit for purpose. The Covid-19 Sound and Vision scheme showed how this can work. Future schemes must support live programming. The concept of additionality must be changed and the schemes must be practical and user-friendly.

The Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2022 is getting a lot of attention at the moment. We thank politicians of all parties and indeed this committee for their engagement. We have achieved a lot of progress on some issues. However, the issue of the levy remains outstanding. We believe this is a very modest ask. Unless action is taken soon, the situation regarding how the new regulator is funded next year, specifically, will be grossly unfair. We want to see the removal of the broadcasting levy as a significant cost in the same way as it has been removed for the community radio sector. We note the responses made by the Minister to a large number of representations made on this issue, in relation to other funding supports being available and the new funding schemes coming down the line. We do not accept those and would be glad to outline the reasons for this in more detail later. As it stands, next year the independent radio sector will continue to pay the levy to fund regulation while social media giants and online operators will be funded by the Exchequer. This is grossly unfair and we seek a suspension of the levy for next year and the passage of an amendment which will allow for a review of the level of levy paid the following year. We believe this is reasonable.

There are also issues over the equality and equity of regulation and how we are regulated vis-à-visother media. We would be happy to take questions on that later. We would like to stress, beyond the issues of sustainability and the struggle of keeping going on a day-to-day basis, how radio would like to play a continued and vibrant role in the development of Ireland over the next 100 years. This cannot be taken for granted. The manner in which the challenges of viability, sustainability and keeping the show on the road are addressed is of critical importance. There can be no complacency about the continuation of services provided by our members. As I have said, they have a weekly audience of 3.1 million people in this country. Those people deserve to have the services they use supported and continued. Unless the relevant changes are undertaken, however, we will unfortunately be looking into a future of reduced services and a resulting negative impact on our democracy.