Mr. Paul Gordon:

In terms of diversity, that is certainly something we welcomed in the Future of Media Commission report. We would like to see younger people represented on those panels to have that youth lens included.

Going back to Senator Warfield's first question, in terms of monitoring the coverage of young people, it is difficult to do. We represent a broad sector that serves around 300,000 young people but we have a very small communications and digital team that needs to be agile in terms of responding to these issues. It is more a reactive than a proactive approach. Something we would like to see in the broader sector and in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and for the newly established Coimisiún na Meán to look at is how well young people are represented across media and how they are represented. That is something on which we have not seen systematic research done on in the past 20 years, in the South of Ireland at least, and that is something that needs to be examined. There are consistent themes and negative portrayals of young people. There are these almost dichotomous views of young people as either irresponsible or involved in crime or antisocial behaviour or, on the other side, as very vulnerable and needing to be protected. There is that confusing dichotomy that is projected onto young people, and the way to address that is by using data to ensure we know we are adequately representing what is quite a large youth population in Ireland so that their voices are heard.

In the Nordic countries, for example, specifically in Iceland, a very interesting piece of work to ensure gender balance is actual audits by editors of who is being interviewed on their shows and who has been invited on. They review the shows after three months and they are able to see almost in real time how representative their shows are in terms of gender balance. That is something we would like to see applied to young people as well. It is very important to ensure their voices are heard. Does Ms Chadamoyo Makombe want to pick up on some of Senator Warfield's points?