Ms Deirdre Ní Choistín:

For us under the media fund, 25% is ring-fenced for Irish-language content and that is critically important for us because our funding does not allow us to commission content solely with TG4 funding. We are reliant on the Sound and Vision fund and Cine4 schemes, for example, and we work closely with the Irish language broadcast fund, ILBF, from Northern Ireland Screen. Therefore, funding is important for us for additionality in terms of our commissioning schedule because we cannot commission solely with TG4 funding.

Our news content is currently provided under section 120 of the Broadcasting Act by RTÉ. It is part of the Future of Media Commission recommendations that TG4 should have independent editorial control. We know from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report published yesterday that Irish-language audiences are also looking for online news and we do not have that at the moment. Until that kind of plurality aspect is put into place and the recommendation implemented, we cannot move forward on serving the Irish-language audiences with a better news service. They are being underserved at the moment in comparison with the ubiquity of English-language news across all platforms and broadcasters. We need to-----