Mr. Noel Curran:

Sport is critical for us, particularly when we cover national events and Gaelic games as our national sports. Our coverage of international events in sports like rugby also represents a critical part of our public service. Sport is expensive. We had an absolute bubble in the sports rights sector when Setanta initially expanded and TV3 received an investment of private equity. We managed to hold on to the bulk of what we had. I think people like Glen Killane and Ryle Nugent in our sports department deserve full credit for that. It is getting more difficult. Sky is a huge entity with huge resources. It is becoming more difficult for us to hold on to all of these things, particularly following the reductions in public funding. We compete in an international market. We are committed to sport. We are committed to holding onto sport, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. The Premier League suffered because we needed to make a cutback. We had to decide whether to drop a number of GAA games or to drop the Premier League. We decided to drop the Premier League. We are now making such choices on a daily and weekly basis. We have managed to hold on to sports rights. I think it will be increasingly difficult for us to do so. There is no point saying otherwise. It may have seemed that the hit we took in the budget involved a small amount of money, but €5 million a year would secure an awful lot of domestic sports rights.