Mr. Adrian Lynch:

I will answer the question on news. There were three points within that. First, what comes out very strongly from the Future of Media Commission report is that it looked at the broader media sector, especially around trust values. What unites us all here today is the fact we know the media landscape is being so disruptive and that disinformation is a massive societal issue. We saw that particularly during Covid-19 and we see it through numerous things. Having trusted media, which Ireland has, is something we need to protect and think about in terms of how we fund them.

As for commercial diversification, if the Senator looks at RTÉ's accounts over the past eight years, he will see the commercial number is between approximately €148 million and €150 million over that time. If he went back to 2012, there were fewer opt-outs operating in this country. There was no Disney+, TikTok, Facebook or Google taking significant money out of the market. Right now, we are almost a minnow at €145 million because the total value of this market is €1.1 billion. From an advertising point of view the commercial market has very much been absorbed primarily into technology companies, which is an issue for all of the Irish media. However, RTÉ has diversified its revenue stream in terms of things like streaming video on demand, VOD, and what we do with our digital products and other types of commercial activities. Overall, the result has been quite stable over the last period of time despite the fact the composition of that commercial number has changed underneath.