Mr. S?amus Dooley:

When I started as a trade union official 25 years ago, many of the training initiatives in the print sector were done by the FÁS print industry training committee. There is no equivalent whatsoever of that body now. There is no national in-service training body. There is no one national body for the media industry. To go back to a question I was asked earlier, I do not believe the new media commission, which has so many powers and so much responsibility, will be able to do that. The industry, and the implication for the industry, are sufficiently important that we need a separate training and development agency, not just to bring people in but also to assist, perhaps through a transitional fund, in the kind of transferring, training and upskilling that were referred to by Mr. Mulrennan. We need that. My concern is that the all-singing, all-dancing body that will replace the BAI is simply not going to work. All present are aware that training, education and development tend to be an add-on extra. What I am saying is that we need to do them. We do not need to go too many years back to see a time when it was done very effectively.

On a final point in terms of the reference to public service advertising, I want to echo a concern that was issued earlier by Local Ireland in particular. We need far greater transparency in this country as to how ads are allocated, why we are working through agencies, how decisions are made and what are the criteria. There has to be much more transparency in that regard. I echo the DCU line on that. If we are talking about public service funding, and it is a necessary part of the structure, we need transparency. We want to make sure there is absolute clarity on how those ads are allocated and who gets them. I am still at a loss as to why ads have to be placed through an agency. During Covid-19, there was absolutely no reason that HSE ads had to go through an agency at all and there was no need for a broker system for that. There are fundamental issues about the allocation and, in particular, issues about cross-ownership of agencies, also linked to media ownership. I am not going to go into that here at this hour of the evening, but they need examination.