Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 24 November 2022

Public Accounts Committee

Financial Statements 2021: National Lottery Fund

9:30 am

Photo of Jennifer Carroll MacNeillJennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Fair enough. I do not expect Ms Boate to have that. I am interested in the indexing, from a media organisation's perspective, and what proportion. That is something for us to consider and part of our investigation is asking Ms Boate.

Ms Boate says she does not have the exact numbers because it is not in her authority. Returning again to persuasive authority, it appears to me there is a very strict reading of the licence. I suggest that the regulator has much greater authority than might be the case in the licence because of that persuasive authority. I think the regulator could ask for a breakdown of, say, how much was going to RTÉ, the Irish Daily Mail or Irish Independent. Ms Boate referred to positioning and targeting and how the regulator does have oversight of that. If there was an overindexing, so to speak, in The Clare Champion, for example, or another geographically based newspaper or a newspaper that catered or targeted itself towards a particular demographic, would that concern the regulator? Would she look for information on that basis so that she could understand positioning more broadly in the market?

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