Ms Fionnuala Rabbitt:

I am CEO of Highland Radio, a local radio station in Donegal. I wanted to address the issue of gender balance, which was mentioned. Ms Cummins and I are two of four women who currently run independent radio stations in Ireland. We are more than aware that there have been issues in the past, particularly in relation to females, and we are addressing them. We are addressing them through Learning Waves but people do not realise the number of women who are working behind the scenes. There is always a concern because people say they cannot hear women on air and that means those voices are not being heard. They are a part of the community and people are not hearing their views and their thoughts. In stations such as mine, 60% of the behind-the-scenes staff, which includes journalists, programme controllers and producers, are women. These are the ways in which women are contributing. Ms Hanratty will back this up with regard to the graduate programme. It is full of women who want to become journalists, who want to move through broadcasting and who have an interest in news and journalism but it is vital that we get the funding. That is where we have the most difficulty at the moment. There is only so much the industry can support so it is vital that we get the funding from the Government, through the BAI and Skillnet Ireland, in order to continue that.

The other side is why we cannot get more journalists, more women and more people from different ethnic backgrounds? As NUJ mentioned, it is the cost. We are not in a position to offer ginormous wages. That is just a fact of life. Radio stations have struggled in the past few years when we were all on a knife edge with everything. Now we are slowly coming back but it is a very slow process. There are external economic factors we cannot control in our own stations. I am up in Donegal. We went from suffering the impact of Brexit and the fear around it as a Border county into Covid and now we are back to Brexit again and wondering whether there will be a recession. These are all things that are impacting the station. This is why we feel the funding we are looking for is very fair. Consider the amount of public service broadcasting. Radio, in particular, but also our colleagues in other media have proof after Covid of the amount of work we have put in that is vital to the communities we serve. We are looking for funding for our public-service content. The other side is a reduction of the levy. We are trying to do things in our stations to continue to grow and to be viable and to continue to represent the areas where we work so that we can bring in more equality and diversity and have more journalists and give them better paying jobs. All this is helped by the reduction in the levy and through any government assistance. The concern is if money is coming from the Government, how do we say we are not on one side or the other? The Senator answered his own question when he spoke of journalists and the fact that the media should make being in politics a more attractive proposition and that we should help to get good people into politics. We are already doing that, I think. We are holding people to account. We have politicians coming in and out. We talk about the good work that politicians do but we also put their feet to the fire if we feel they are not representing their constituents in the way they should. Government funding will not have a negative impact on the work we do. It will only help us grow and be stronger and represent our communities even better.