Ms Linda O'Reilly:

On the point of getting good staff and senior journalists trained, The Anglo-Celt has lost two senior reporters in the past couple of years, which is unfortunate but I suppose we should be optimistic because we had them for so many years and we generally do not have a high staff turnover. We had a serious problem recruiting senior reporters to replace them. The reason I find is that while there are plenty of fine young graduates coming from places like DCU, and the courses are good, they do not have the practical experience. There has also been a major brain drain from the industry with journalists leaving. Many colleagues and friends of mine who I started out with in college and in work have now gone to work at PR agencies or as Government press secretaries and so on and so forth. They are leaving the industry and we cannot get suitable replacements. Skills like court reporting are becoming non-existent. I had to take a retired court reporter out of retirement this week to give us a bit of a dig out because there were sittings of the Circuit Court and the District Court. It also must be recognised that existing editors and journalists put in an incredible amount of time into training these young graduates in bringing them to courts, and there is a significant human resource investment required in that. An editor must send two people down to the court. One or two times will not cut it, they would need to be going down there for months with another reporter shadowing them. Then we must still write up these court cases. There is significant investment ongoing by regional news publishers in training these journalists.