Ms Breda O'Keeffe:

The Deputy asked whether we had done enough. He also mentioned a lot of other semi-State companies that have come in and have a similar story because similar economic conditions apply to them as well. We have taken €130 million out of the cost base. There was some low-hanging fruit earlier on and it was taken out. However, even in the last two years, we have taken over €50 million out of the cost base through a wide-scale restructuring, so it was not just low-hanging fruit at that point. We are continuing to do that so it is an ongoing journey for us, although where we can go at this stage is very minimal because the cost reductions have more or less been done.

The Deputy also asked what other semi-State companies have done. I am not here to throw cold water on anything that any other semi-State company has done because it is difficult for anyone in receipt of public funding to have that funding reduced. Our own public funding was reduced by the order of €20 million over the past five years, but the large part of our funding disappeared because our commercial revenue declined by €95 million. We suffer from that aspect of being a dual funded broadcaster in that our commercial as well as our State funding has been reduced.

In the appendices we submitted today, we gave the committee comparisons with other semi-State companies. We would argue that we have done more than double what others have done because we have had to. We are not crowing over that but we have had to do so because of our funding requirement.

As regards whether we have done enough, cost cutting is only one metric. We have spent quite a bit of time benchmarking against our European counterparts, that is, other broadcasters such as ORF, Danmarks Radio and NRK in Norway. We would compare favourably with them on a cost per hour basis. We have also done studies on the cost of our orchestras and we compare favourably in that regard. We believe we benchmark reasonably well or fairly well with other broadcasters in that respect.

Deputy Dooley mentioned the conflict with cost reduction, that at some point one begins to start cutting into programmes. Questions were raised about the London office and various programme cuts, and that will always be the tension. Cost reduction gives rise to certain casualties that are not always appealing. However, we try to maintain output, and despite all those cost reductions, our output levels have not been reduced that significantly over that period.