Mr. Stephen Ryan:

On behalf of the Department, I thank the committee for the invitation to discuss the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill 2023.

RTÉ, as our longest established public service broadcaster, is in possession of thousands of hours of content documenting Irish life, culture and the history of the State. The preservation and cataloguing of this content, as well as the content held by all of our broadcasters, is a vital record of our national heritage. This Bill seeks to allow greater public access to this content by way of inserting, as a statutory function of the director general, duties with regard to making the archives available, including the provision of finding aids. The Bill also seeks to ensure that the archives are made available free of charge in many circumstances.

As the Minister indicted on Second Stage and as is outlined in the submission made by the Department to this committee in May, it is the view of the Minister and Department that while the intention behind the Bill is laudable, it raises a number of matters and potential impacts, both administrative and financial, that need to be considered. Before ensuring the increased access which the Bill seeks to achieve, it is imperative that this valuable content is first preserved by being fully digitised and catalogued as soon as possible. RTÉ is currently undertaking a substantial digitisation project and diverting resources from this to allow for greater access runs the risk of further deterioration or even loss of valuable archive material. The proposal to make the archives freely available is likely to have a financial impact on RTÉ and TG4 because staffing and other resources may need to be diverted to manage archival requests or to develop archival access or finding aids. Consideration would also need to be given to possible implications concerning a range of issues including copyright legislation, data protection, contractual obligations and, of course, performers and contributors’ rights, as well as other third-party intellectual property owners, and how these would impact the availability of existing content. It would also be necessary to consider the potential impact on the independent production sector should broadcasters be required to ensure free access to copyright content into the future. This may be of increasing concern as our public service broadcasters continue to commission greater levels of content from the independent sector.

It is important to consider the approach of the Bill to insert a singular additional and specific function or duty on the director general. This raises the question of how the respective responsibilities of the board and director general are framed and, likewise, the accountability of a director general to the board, considering the merits of prescriptive duties or allowing greater scope for a board to align duties within the legislative framework with its own strategic priorities.

The Department is happy to continue to engage and work with the committee on all of the matters raised in its examination of the proposed Bill.