Mr. Michael O'Keeffe:

It is a challenge. There is undoubtedly a massive imbalance. Under the scheme, the requirement is to have 25% Irish and bilingual programming, and we achieve that annually from the entire scheme. Clearly, in television we achieve more than that. There is an issue related to the number of broadcasters. In television there are a limited number of broadcasters that apply for support from the fund. TG4 is obviously a strong applicant or a supporter of applications for the fund.

On the radio side that is not the case. We have a number of Irish language broadcasters. We have Raidió na Life in Dublin and Raidió na Gaeltachta. They have not contributed to a great extent. Some of the community services have put in projects which are either Irish or bilingual. Generally speaking, across the rest of the sector, we would not receive many applications in Irish. It is linked to the number of applications we receive, which is quite low.