Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

I will answer Deputy Dooley's question. I thank the Deputy for his comments. As to the future and the road to recovery, I believe we have embarked on the road to recovery. There are several key factors that are important in my experience. One of them is that we have the right people in the right jobs. I have been extremely impressed with many of the staff in RTE news and current affairs that I have come across so far. We have made some new senior appointments since I started this role - the managing editor of current affairs, the new editor of "Prime Time" and the new editor of our investigative unit - who are all people with a great deal of journalistic experience and credibility, and I am very confident in their abilities. The right leadership in the organisation is very important. When I came to this job, the director general and his board had made substantial changes to training and to making the values of the organisation very clear. A clarity about values and what we stand for is very important. People need to understand that and have it in their DNA. We need fairness, accuracy and impartiality. We will be judged by our audiences and by all of the members, and rightly so, and that is very clear to our teams.

There are other issues we have touched on in this discussion. The training of the teams is very important. There has been a substantial amount of training. People need to know the journalism guidelines back to front and they need to be refreshed in their knowledge. All new people who come into the organisation in whatever role need to be familiar with those, and we need to know they are familiar with them. There is more training going on.

The question of social media has come up a few times and, as I said, it is an important and current part of what we do. It is also fraught with all manner of dangers, as we know, and trying to get a balance right between use of social media and having the guidelines in place on how we use it is very important.

It is very important that we are open. I have met representatives of many of the political parties so far and there are more to come. I have made it clear that I come to this job with no political baggage in this country, which is an advantage in some ways. I am working on my knowledge of politics here, and I think I am doing okay, but I have made it clear that we will listen to political parties. If we get things wrong, we will say so and we will change them. If I do not think we have got things wrong, I will also say so. I think we have made that clear. I agree with the director general that it is very important that we apologise in a timely and proper manner when we do get things wrong. We have done that a few times and if we can do it within a programme, on the day or whatever, I would take a view about these things, but it is important we get that right.

I am very honoured to have this job. I take my personal responsibility for the job quite seriously. When we have future general election or presidential debates it will be my personal responsibility to make sure we handle them in the correct way.