Mr. Dave O'Connell:

I am struggling but at my most humble. I am 40 years in this industry. We have honestly never been under greater threat. I would equally argue that our standards have never been as high. Our staff have never been as flexible or creative. Mr. Dooley mentioned values and ethics. They have never been greater and we have never been under greater threat. Against all of the abuse hurled in our direction I say, so what? I will stand proudly for what we do. I admit there was a time in the past, when if a solicitor's letter came in you would ignore it in the hope it would go away. That does not happen and cannot happen, because you are ratcheting that up from day one. You can be assured, if you have a problem, that it will be dealt with by an editor in the first instance. If it is not, it will be robustly dealt with by the Press Council. I am steering away from the court at this stage. We have mentioned Bernie Grogan a few times. My experience is that Bernie Grogan is the first port of call in all of this. I assure people of that, if they do not get the apology they are looking for in the first instance, and presuming there is something wrong. One of the frustrations people have with this is that the story is often big and the apology is often small. That is not the case with the Press Council because you have to carry the full judgment. It is often bigger than the story was in the first place. It also has to be carried on a page further forward than where the original article appeared. If you are looking for the profile of the apology and the retraction, you will get that when it comes to the Press Council. I cannot imagine any scenario where we would refuse to carry the judgment of the Press Council. We signed up for this We support and believe in it. I take from today that we perhaps have to make sure the optics are a lot clearer than they have been. As an industry, we take responsibility for that the same as everybody else in all of this. It goes back to where we started. We are in difficulty. We are one or two libel actions away from the wall. Anything we can do to make sure that does not happen, and that we protect a robust newspaper and radio industry, we will do. We will take that on board. We need help, and we need the committee's help on this.