Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

There was a mention of unpaid internships. I am sure that is across all of the areas the witnesses work in and represent. I believe it is immoral to not offer people remuneration for their time. There is another layer of societal discrimination based on socioeconomic, age, or whatever factors, which is blocking people from getting into it. This is putting work onto the witnesses' organisations to solve a problem that a behemoth like RTÉ should be able to solve itself. Is there any engagement with these organisations which are doing unpaid internships to try to either diversity those internships, offer specialised internships, or strategies to get diversity of people into them to try to change the face of who is doing these internships? Do the witnesses' organisations have any engagement on that?

I am not sure if the witnesses are familiar with the Headline organisation. It came out of the National Office for Suicide Prevention. It is a media monitoring organisation that monitors mental health reporting and reporting particularly around suicidality. Headline has a person who does monitoring. It is a great organisation. As has been highlighted, everyone at the committee is under resourcing constraints. Is there space for an organisation like that? It would be a whopper organisation to have to take on the equality, diversity and inclusion of the media sector. Is there a space for an organisation that does that monitoring? Headline works with a number of organisations and mental health charities. There is a whole training piece as well. Would there be an appetite within each of the organisations represented here for something like that? I am not sure who it would fall under. I do not want to land it onto the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, or someone else. It would be a specific piece of monitoring as to what is happening. It is balanced and offers feedback about how something could have been slightly better and that kind of thing. Would something like that within the witnesses' organisations be something they would support or be interested in seeing happen? Academic research is done on it but these things are not all pulled together. It just so happens someone does a piece of research. Would there an appetite for a new organisation for something like that?

I am not sure if the witness organisations are familiar with the Headline organisation. It came out of the National Office for Suicide Prevention. It is a media monitoring organisation that monitors mental health reporting and reporting particularly around suicidality. Headline has a person who does monitoring. It is a great organisation. As has been highlighted, everyone at the committee is under resourcing constraints. Is there space for an organisation like that? It would be a whopper organisation to have to take on the equality, diversity and inclusion of the media sector. Is there a space for an organisation that does that monitoring? Headline works with a number of organisations and mental health charities. There is a whole training piece as well. Would there be an appetite within each of the witness organisations for something like that? I am not sure who it would fall under. I do not want to land it onto the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, or, someone else. It would be a specific piece of monitoring as to what is happening. It is balanced and offers feedback about how something could have been slightly better, kind of thing. Would something like that within the witness organisations be something they would support or be interested in seeing happen? Academic research is done on it but these things are not all pulled together. It just so happens someone does a piece of research. Would there by appetite for a new organisation or something like that?

People mentioned equality, diversity and inclusion, EDI. I was at an LGBT conference over the summer and someone added in a "B" into "EDI" for "belonging". That made me reflect on how we think about EDI. Giving those groups a sense of belonging within it moves it from the tokenistic piece of, "Here you are", to, "You belong here, you are embedded into the system. It is not just a documentary about you, you are embedded into our story lines, you are presenting or you are a creator or producer". That interested me, in the context of what we are talking about today.