Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair very much. I welcome the Minister and thank her for her work. Her Department and her Ministry is generally considered to be one of positive news and one which, with the clear guidance of the Minister, always had a fairly straightforward run. That was clearly not the case in this instance on this side of her brief and she has gone through a very difficult time. This committee, and others, have been actively involved in getting to the root of what has happened at RTÉ and that has been to the benefit of the future of public service broadcasting, hopefully.

I also believe those of us in public life have a responsibility to leave that now to the committees which the Minister has established. I have full faith in what she is attempting to do and I expect, as professionals, that they will deliver on that.

Where I have some concern is that the debate within the Oireachtas has not moved to a point of asking where we go from here. While I often agree and sometimes disagree with my friend, Deputy Mattie McGrath, it cannot be that we just do not give RTÉ any money until those reports are brought to a fruition. If we do that, the whole thing stops there.

I am taken by the extent to which people are rightly upset about what has happened and have decided for various different reasons to send a message by not paying their licence fee. They are still, however, consuming the product. RTÉ is still delivering every day, from senior management to the people who open the doors every day. The content gets out there thanks to the people I meet working on the broadcasting areas, the rigs, the vans and the cameras. They are all doing their work. There is, for sure, a problem and we have to get to the bottom of it. The State has to stand behind the public service broadcaster in a manner which ensures it continues.

I believe we need to move the debate quickly towards what we believe to be public service broadcasting. I would like to understand a little bit more from the Minister because I see a chicken-and-egg situation here. The Minister is saying to the director general to give her a report and that she will then decide if she will fund the organisation, or fund it to a particular tune. I suspect that if we drill into what the director general said here at the committee on the last day, it is difficult to know what kind of a strategic direction one can have unless one knows what money one has in order to do that. That is one point.

The second point is on cost-cutting.

A headline takeaway from the Minister's script - I was just perusing the social media and mainstream media - is that RTÉ must show a commitment to reducing its costs. That can be interpreted in many ways. To get confidence back, we have to see that RTÉ does not waste taxpayers' money and that we do not see money being wasted anymore in the outrageous ways we have seen. The amounts were relatively small in the overall budget but they were damaging because of what they were spent on, the club in London, the sandals, and so on. We all know about those now. It takes between €350 million and €400 million to run RTÉ, which it gets from the licence fee and commercial revenue. If we are trying to cut costs from the overall budget in the middle of an inflationary cycle - staffing costs and the cost of energy and so on will go up - what is the baseline? Should we be saying we need to see better value for the money we are spending rather than that €50 million less will be spent next year? Is it not true that it will probably cost more to run RTÉ next year than it did last year as costs are going up but that we will get better value for money because we will not have the wanton waste?

When I talk to people behind the curtain in RTÉ, they say some of the systems are creaking. It has not been able to invest in technology to the extent it should. It is losing the race on digital development. When the director general was before the committee, he made it clear that cutting discretionary spending would immediately impact on the digital agenda. We cannot measure RTÉ against the amount of money. We must give some direction around what we want RTÉ to look like. What is the future of public service broadcasting in a digital era? Will we transition it away from the broadcast, which a lot fewer people are watching than in the past? The number is dropping every week. People are consuming television in a different format. If we are to have the bedrock to protect our democracy, we need to get RTÉ, as a public service broadcaster, into the digital space so that trusted content and news are available and there is respect for our heritage, culture and creative skills. I would like to get a sense from the Minister of what she is looking for in return for saying it is okay to spend money and that she is prepared to back RTÉ. What kind of direction is she giving on reshaping?

The Minister said earlier - I had to leave so I did not hear all she said - that she knew what she did not want to see. Perhaps she could help by telling the committee what she would like see.