Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick, Fine Gael)
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I thank the representatives from RTE for their attendance. From the point of view of the Irish in Britain, this is the second botched announcement from RTE within two years, the first being the closure of the London office. I understand it has been advertised this morning that RTE now wishes to reopen it and to base a person in ITN. There is a press release on RTE's website to the effect that it intends to recruit somebody, which probably is an acknowledgement that the closure should not have happened in the first place. I note that considerable disappointment was expressed at the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly that alternatives were not considered when that office was closed and that alternative savings were not made.

I agree with Deputy Maloney that a sledgehammer was used to crack a nut because this probably would have gone away naturally, for want of a better expression, in any event. I am aware it was a huge connection, having worked in the United Kingdom over summer holidays and having stayed with an uncle who had emigrated in the 1950s, in whose home the radio was never turned off and the television was never turned on. Regardless of whether it was Munster championships or even weather or sea area forecasts, these were huge things in the lives of those people. They are of a generation in which the only tablets they get come from a pharmacy and as for asking them to go online or do anything like that, it simply is an absolute foreign language.

In respect of the cost of €250,000 associated with this service, one point that has not been mentioned heretofore concerns RTE's advertising stream, through which it is co-financed. I imagine that those who advertise with RTE do so in the knowledge that their advertising is also going out to a wider community of people outside this jurisdiction, including Northern Ireland and Britain and that there is a potential return for RTE's advertisers from the money they pay RTE for advertising. It is not simply advertising within the Twenty-six Counties but is a much wider remit. The amount of money involved is relatively small when one considers RTE's total revenue or its total income. I have stated here previously that when one considers some of the salaries RTE is paying, getting a position within RTE on a prime-time television or radio slot is like winning the lotto because it does not get any better than that. No other broadcasters in Britain or Ireland are paying as much as RTE still does, relative to the size of the country. The population of Britain is 20 times that of Ireland and one should consider the salary base there.

One should then consider the service that is provided to what is, by and large, an elderly cohort of people in Britain and Northern Ireland, who are not technologically adept and who do not have the skills set to change. I do not dispute the figure of €250,000 that is required to provide the service, because it probably represents a fair assessment. However, that sum will be taken and RTE proposes to get rid of this service without any consideration of the damage it might do to the advertising base, for instance, for those who no longer will have the wherewithal to listen. Regardless of whether Barry's tea or Lyon's tea is being advertised on the radio in the United Kingdom, this is a cohort of people who buy such products and who always will and they are being sold to over the system RTE now proposes to close down. As I stated at the outset, RTE made a botched job of the announcement of the closure of the London office.

That was evident when President Higgins visited the UK and not only did RTE not have a London office, but the whole of Montrose was transposed to Windsor. Even the weather forecast was broadcast from there during the few days of the visit. Everybody was dispatched there, highlighting the fact that the office should never have closed in the first instance. RTE is being penny mean and pound foolish and it is not seeing the bigger picture. If €250,000 cannot be sourced in the organisation without discommoding a significant group of people who have been loyal to the station for a long number of years and to its advertisers, who, in turn, have been loyal to the station, it needs to look at this again before making another bags of an announcement when it comes to the UK.