Mr. Colm O'Callaghan:

I will deal with Deputy Bruton's question on the editorial side and I will allow Mr. Deans and Mr. Mullen to talk about the commercial aspects.

The question is very timely. We begin a second series of a magazine show called "Heated" on Thursday night on RTÉ 1 at 7 p.m. It is very prominent in the RTÉ 1 schedule and deals with that circularity, the circle economy, restoration, refitting, keeping goods in circulation and innovation. This is a magazine series, which is pretty much widely family demographic based, playing very deliberately off the back of the "Six One" news, but it is just one of a number of offerings and a number of ways we are dealing with what can often be a very dense and abstract concept for people to get their heads around. We are consistently tracking audience sentiment, probably no more so than the committee members themselves. We are in a general election cycle. We know what is occupying people's minds. It can be very difficult in a cost-of-living, health or housing crisis to actually penetrate with something as abstract as a climate crisis. That said, there are floods in Bantry and Waterford and suddenly it is back in the news cycle and back as a live agenda. Just because something is not driving a news cycle at a particular point in time is not a good enough reason not to cover something.

Regarding the coverage we do editorially, we go wide and we go far in as much as we can, restrained, of course, by the fact that we are not a natural history or a climate channel. We are a mixed genre channel but in terms of our output we have certainly increased our hourage exponentially over the past ten years. We do that through everything from cláracha Gaeilge to young people's programmes to what we do ourselves in the factual area. To split out the factual area, we can go with something very dense and policy-led such as the Philip Boucher-Hayes series earlier on this year on rising tides, we can go with the circular economy piece on Thursday night on RTÉ 1, or we can continue to do stories regularly on "Ear to the Ground" that looks at rural affairs. This series has consistently, even though it is a strand that deals with rural Ireland ostensibly, that is, rural areas, agriculture and its future, it has not been shy in dealing with climate, sustainability and conservation over the past 15 years. To give particular credit to Ella McSweeney, she has driven that. We go wide and we go far. What experience has taught us is that it can be difficult to get right. There can be a lot of audience resistance to it but we are a public service broadcaster and that is not a good enough reason not to do something. We are wholly committed to it and we will continue to make that commitment.