Mr. Bill Tyson:

We do not. In the original broadcasting Bill, the word "community" is mentioned 87 times. There are mentions of community, but what we are concerned about is that the community broadcaster is not distinguished from regional and local broadcasters, which seems to be a bit of an anomaly. That is something we are very concerned about.

The amount of funding that we are seeking, not just for community television but for the community radio sector, is €4 million, which sounds like a lot but it is not when it is divided between 21 radio stations and two community TV stations.

Senator Comyn mentioned that she worked with Navan TV, which was a great resource. There were three, but we now have two community TV stations. It is a real struggle to survive. In the past ten years we had no core funding whatsoever. At times, we were surviving on less than €20,000 a year to run a TV station by scrabbling funding together from various sources. We now have some core funding, at €75,000, less than half of which is for content, and some for staffing. We are talking about crumbs off the table for us. You are getting a lot of bang for your buck. For a few minutes of content on RTÉ, we can run a whole community TV station.