Mr. Rory Coveney:

It is inappropriate to use the word "bail-out" because this is about funding public services that are not necessarily sustainable commercially. To take two of our radio stations as an example, Raidió na Gaeltachta and Lyric FM do not have big enough audiences to sustain themselves through advertising. Whole swathes of content we broadcast which, as Mr. Lynch said, caters for minority interests does not pay for itself in terms of commercial return. That is why the funding model exists. These are public goods, or merit goods, as the Future of Media Commission report identified them as, which are worth sustaining.