Mr. Ian McGuinness:

With regard to recruitment, I am the Irish organiser with the National Union of Journalists. I would link diversity, low pay, and the abuse of journalists in the context of problems with recruitment. We held a students' seminar last Thursday with about 60 people. The majority of the students were women and there were quite a number of ethnic minorities. It was very positive to see the new Irish and so many women there. Journalism is a fantastic profession - Mr. Séamus Dooley and I are both ex-journalists - but quite often the problem with the recruitment of young people is that when a person goes into the profession, he or she is all starry eyed. In a single day a journalist can be speaking to a Deputy and then covering a Christmas tree lighting in the afternoon or covering a car crash. There is diversity in journalistic stories and this can inspire people to work in the area. The problem we have with regard to recruitment is the swathes of low pay in massive sectors of the industry. I speak as someone who comes from a working-class background. When I did my journalism degree at Dublin City University 25 years ago I was one of a handful of working-class journalists. This is one of the elements of diversity that we often forget about: the huge swathe of working-class people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are excluded from what is perceived to be a middle-class profession because they cannot afford it. They literally could not afford the rent and they would have to stay at home with their mother and father. They cannot afford to go into a profession where they would be lowly paid. I would link the low recruitment of people to the abuse that Mr. Dooley mentioned, particularly for women, as well as racist and homophobic abuse, online. It is hard enough to be a journalist when staffing numbers are going down and when the expansion of social media and the use of social media has spiralled workloads out of control. It is hard enough to deal with that workload and stress as a new and younger journalist, but when a person also must take sexist, homophobic and racist abuse from cowards online, which happens all of the time, or whenever a journalist is threatened when he or she goes to court, we see how young journalists could very easily become disillusioned by that. We try as much as possible to provide supports and not just industrial relations: we provide supports for journalists who are threatened.

Journalism is in crisis and by this I mean journalists. We did a survey, which was by no means a scientific survey: it is a snapshot in time, and 360 journalists took part. The results showed that in the past decade 80% of them had thought of leaving journalism or are considering doing so now, with 90% knowing a journalist who had left journalism or were considering doing so now. It is not just about recruiting journalists, it is about protecting especially young journalists, ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ communities. It is also about ensuring there is appropriate pay that allows people such as those from a working-class background, as well as freelancers, who we have not spoken about here yet, to actually make a living out of it. It is about recruiting them and retaining them as well. Those are the problems I would connect to diversity, low pay, abuse and recruitment all in one.