Mr. Rory Coveney:

I thank the Senator. The issue of licence fee reform has been around for a while. There have been a series of reports and reviews, most done completely independently of RTÉ. They have been done by the BAI or this committee in the past and the most recent was the Future of Media Commission report.

Part of the reason we structured our opening statement around the core building blocks of the sustainability of RTÉ's funding model is because it is important. They are integrated. As I said, we have a broad remit that no one wants to change. There is no public support for it to be substantially reduced or changed, nor does there seem to be any political desire to do so. As I said, it has implications for the cost of delivering the broad remit to all audiences in terms of multiple types of content across multiple types of services. That is not going to change.

If our remit is adjusted, then we can adjust costs to compensate for a lack of reform in the television licensing fee. Sometimes it gets characterised as if we are looking for some sort of bailout in terms of the public funding question. The public funding part of our dual funding mandate is essential to deliver the public services that we are obliged to deliver. The public funding system by common consent is not working. Not only is it losing substantial amounts of money every year; it could be going into a lot of businesses here today in order to support content generation, journalism and all of the other things we want to talk about and do. The current system is unfair to those who pay the fee because a significant portion of people are not paying.

As our business model evolves towards streaming and digital publishing, something we have to do in order to keep pace with audience trends and the market, we are fundamentally undermining the licence fee even further because as it is currently constituted streaming does not come under it. People accessing our services exclusively through the RTÉ player are not obliged to pay the fee.

It is an existential question. I am not remotely suggesting that the fixes are easy or without political costs.