Mr. John Purcell:

Níl a lán Gaeilge agam, so I will speak as Béarla if that is okay.

Just to clarify, IBI is the representative organisation for the different radio stations. We do not provide services to the radio stations as such. Much of the Irish-language content is stipulated in the broadcasting licences which are individually negotiated between individual radio stations and Coimisiún na Meán, formerly the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. Ms O'Malley spoke about the "Clár sa Charr" project, which was the first instance in which our organisation, IBI, acted as an enabler for content. We said we had an idea for a programme feature which could be used to promote the use of the Irish language among people who did not have an awful lot of it. We secured an agreement from nine radio stations to do it. We made an application for funding from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, as it then was, under the sound and vision scheme, and we were successful. IBI then co-ordinated that project centrally. To date, it is the only project we have done ourselves but we would like to do more. It was successful. In my own station - KCLR, which serves Kilkenny and Carlow - it was broadcast in primetime during our breakfast programme, at 8.40 a.m. when we reckoned children would be in the car with their parents. We designed it to be accessible and appealing. We put a lot of effort into putting the broadcasts into context by telling people in English what they were going to hear in Irish. We believe it is a groundbreaking approach and a very positive one. It has been very successful. As I have said, we have applied for another round of it. Before I talk about the other round, I would like to say that while we do not have specific listener figures for this programme, I would estimate that having been broadcast in primetime across nine considerable radio stations, an audience in the region of 120,000 to 180,000 listeners would have heard it. We have applied for further funding but we do not know the status of that. As we said in our presentation, funding tends to be ad hoc because we do not know when schemes will come along. As they are for short-term projects, it militates against long-term planning. I know that the nine stations which took part in the project would be willing to do more and to increase their levels. As with professional full-time broadcasters, funding is the key issue faced by broadcasters in the voluntary and community sectors. I hope that goes some way towards an cheist a fhreagairt.