Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 July 2023

Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media

Future of Sports Broadcasting: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Declan McBennett:

None. The money comes in and allows us to put more free-to-air sport on RTÉ. In the context of the league competitions, one of the criticisms was that we did not have a calendar footprint. In other words,we used to show up in May and disappear in September. That was a perfectly legitimate criticism of RTÉ a number of years ago. What we now do is broadcast from January to November. We do the league, the championship and the club competitions. That has to be paid for. As the Senator well knows, we are living in an environment where licence fee and commercial income are going down. The events of past three weeks are likely to exacerbate those trends. If we want to pay for sport, which is vastly expensive as we have heard from Mr. Farrell in terms of putting boots on the ground, which is what RTÉ does, we have to find a methodology to pay for that. What we do, therefore, is take the money and broadcast more free-to-air sport.

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