Mr. Colm O'Callaghan:

As a public broadcaster I do not think that we can be determined exclusively by ratings. Obviously, you invest lots of public money into quality content and you want people to watch. Science and this area is a hard sell, but that is not a good enough reason not to do it. Unlike colleagues in the BBC, for example, we tend to play our science, diversity and climate change output very prominently on our first channel. In the UK, an awful lot of this stuff would play on BBC 2. It is a challenging area, and yet on some of the content we have done over the last four or five years we have gone in there with 23%, 24% or 25% shares in pre-watershed and post-watershed, which represents very good returns for content that can be quite abstract.

In respect of the natural history and wildlife output, yes, we can do more. We are very active in that area. An awful lot of that content is time dependent. It is very costly and very expensive. The Deputy mentioned Ken O'Sullivan's last series. We have three hours of Ken coming up in 2023, looking at the impact of fisheries on the whale population. That will be three hours of big, internationally focused, high-end documentary making. There are three hours upcoming from the same crew that does the Colin Stafford-Johnson stuff about wildlife on Ireland's islands. Last year we did a beautiful two-part series set on the Burren. We are partnered up with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications on the wild Atlantic nature project in the west of Ireland. Could we be doing more? I am sure we absolutely could. I would love to be doing more. Is there an appetite for it? There certainly is. However, it is very time-consuming and when we are looking at placing these big projects in the schedule we are looking at these things occurring in real time. They often take from two to four years and an awful lot of that time can be spent raising funds to try and get these projects up and under way.