Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

They are making everything from documentaries, to drama and live music and all these different spheres of activity. There are opportunities here to provide new and fresh slots for these programme makers' output, as opposed to repeats. I do take the points made by Dr. Mathews, though. Equally, however, there does seem to be an increased proliferation of these repeats. I appreciate his response and that this issue will perhaps be taken up with the programming subcommittee.

My next point concerns something I am passionate about, as are many other people, namely, the whole area of wildlife, biodiversity and environmental programming.

As we are aware, and I appreciate Ms Ní Raghallaigh is just in the role since September, "Eco Eye" served the country so well. It covered the environmental topic incredibly well for over 21 years, one of the only programmes to do so on a regular basis, but, as we know, it wound down this year. RTÉ has said it has put out a public call for a replacement programme on environmental, climate and biodiversity issues, and I am wondering where that is. Sometimes, when it comes to public service broadcasting, we have to look at the public good and the service that a programmes does, as opposed to just flat viewing figures. With programming on climate change, wildlife and biodiversity, it is a case of "Build it and they will come". We have to provide a service to create awareness around loss of biodiversity and the climate change issue. I am looking for some answers in regard to what will replace “Eco Eye”, which gave such fantastic service for so long.

In the biodiversity and wildlife area, “Springwatch”, “Autumnwatch” and “Winterwatch” on the BBC have been a huge success in creating an incredible level of interest in biodiversity in the UK. Some of their citizen science projects, where they get people to go out and, for example, count insects or birds in their back garden, have been an extraordinary success. We do not have that level of uptake here. Is that type of programming something we could look at going forward? Again, that is in the context of perhaps ignoring the viewing figures, because I believe they will come, and just looking at the whole public service aspect of it.