Mr. Michael O'Keeffe:

I thank the Chairman and the members for inviting us to address the joint committee this evening. We are looking forward to making this presentation. We are prepared to make formal appearances at the joint committee and to give briefings on any topics relating to broadcasting that the Chairman or the members might want us to address in the future. We have done that in the past and we would like to continue to do so. Our offer is open.

This presentation has a number of elements. I will give a brief outline of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's objectives and activities to date. I will look at some of the outcomes of the five-year review that took place in 2013 and the main elements of the next review. I will touch on some of the issues pertaining to the commercial and community sectors and how we will deal with such issues in our next strategy, on which we launched a consultation last week. The authority's statutory objectives and functions are set out in the 2009 Act. One of our objectives is to facilitate RTE and TG4 in fulfilling their functions. We have a range of functions that are associated with those objectives. They are primarily concerned with how TG4 and RTE use public funding, but they are also concerned with the impact of their commercial and economic activities, particularly as they apply to or impact on the competing commercial sector. Our activities are designed to show that the public service broadcasters are using public funding efficiently, effectively, in a transparent manner and in pursuit of their public service objects, as set out in the Broadcasting Acts. That would be important in terms of the role we have with them.

Our broad regulatory activities in relation to RTE and TG4 can be divided into two. Members of the committee will be familiar with our content-monitoring activities, which include assessing levels of compliance with various codes and rules and considering complaints about broadcasting matters. These codes and rules, including programming codes, advertising codes, access rules and subtitling rules, apply to all broadcasters and not just to RTE and TG4. Our more specific remit with regard to financing involves a number of processes. We look at the broadcasters' statements of commitments on an annual basis, we undertake annual reviews and we do five-year reviews of both RTE and TG4. I will give an example of the sectoral impact assessments we undertake when new services are proposed by broadcasters. We undertook such an assessment and made recommendations to the Minister before the RTE News Now service came on stream in recent years. Regarding economic activities, we look at how RTE is using its commercial revenue and its licence fee income. In the last year, we were involved in the development of RTE's fair trading policy, which looks at how its commercial activities operate fairly within the commercial environment.

As I have mentioned some of the regulatory issues, I will move on to the five-year review, which will look specifically at public funding. The Broadcasting Act 2009 requires the authority to carry out every five years a review of the adequacy of public funding to enable public service broadcasters to meet their public service objects. The presentation we have furnished to the joint committee contains a list of the things we do in that context. We look at the delivery of public service broadcasting, ensure public service broadcasters are relevant to Irish audiences, examine the role of such broadcasters in the creative economy and assess the adequacy of current funding and the question of sustainability. As members are probably aware, the first review was completed in July 2013. We will commence the second review in 2017 and this will be completed in 2018. When it has been completed, we will make a report and issue recommendations to the Minister on the outcome.

Some of the five key recommendations in the first review were covered in the comprehensive scoping document that was prepared for the committee. I suppose the one that stood out was the increase in public funding that was proposed for both RTE and TG4, primarily to increase content. We placed a great deal of emphasis on the question of delivering culturally relevant content for Irish audiences. We recommended that there should be an examination of the cost-effectiveness of RTE and we looked at whether there could be greater deployment of funding to support the independent production sector. We made a number of recommendations regarding the rebalancing of RTE's licence fee and commercial funding. We considered whether there would be greater scope for the commercial sector to benefit if RTE had less reliance on commercial income. We suggested that further analysis was required before making a decision on the proportion of programming that should be made in-house or through independent production. There are differing views on that point within RTE and the various sectors on the outside. Some of the recommendations in the review were implemented and others are still ongoing. Obviously, the funding issue has continued to arise in the annual reviews we have done since then. With the exception of the provisions in the current budget to which Ms Cronin referred, the funding situation has not really changed for RTE and TG4.

We are beginning the process for the next review, which will start in 2017 and will report in early 2018 or the middle of that year. There is a slight change in emphasis in the theme of that review. The earlier review focused on transparency and efficiency, but we are now moving on to the greater challenges encountered by the public service broadcasters as they serve Irish audiences in the evolving digital environment. We will look at future trends and developments. We will examine the capability of the public service broadcasters to meet the challenges. We will review the five-year strategic plans that we will ask the broadcasters to produce in support of our work. We have identified a number of key areas on which we will focus, including the need to serve Irish audiences, creativity, the Irish language, funding implications and any legislative or regulatory changes that are required in support of all of this. The process we will be undertaking will have a number of elements. We will have ongoing consultation with stakeholders throughout the process. We will engage in a range of pieces of research to analyse things like economic trends, international public service media organisations, the general media environment, audience behaviours and technological developments. We will also look at their performance over the past five years. We are hopeful that we will be able to issue a comprehensive report and make recommendations at the end of that period. We hope the Government will be in a position to support our proposals at that time.

It is important to mention the commercial and community broadcasting service. I should make the point that commercial community broadcasters are not public service broadcasters and the Act does not define them as such. However, we recognise that the Act gives them a public purpose and requires that they fill many statutory duties, and they have many public service obligations within the programming that they are required to fulfil on an ongoing basis. That is the distinction we make and we see there is certainly merit in many of the arguments made by them around the requirements they have. There are significant challenges for the sector currently, including the general economic climate as the impact of the recession has been hard. There is also the impact of online media, which is true across the board of traditional broadcasting, as it has changed the way things are. We can see that in the advertising market with changes in audience behaviours. It is also unlikely that the market will ever come back to the level it was at in an earlier stage.

We launched the consultation for our strategy last year and we have put the sustainability of all broadcasters as a central objective, putting it right to the forefront of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland's concerns within that. At our launch last week this was broadly welcomed by the commercial and community sectors. We will examine a range of different funding models and make recommendations where we can to support those, both in legislative and other ways. I should mention a range of other initiatives that I have not put in the presentation that we undertake which support the sectors. There is the sound and vision funding scheme, a sectoral learning and development programme that puts up to €500,000 back into the sector every year and we undertake significant research. We are looking at some of the rules for linear broadcasters; for example, we may relax some of the restrictions in place in the advertising code so as to open additional sources of funding.

That is the work programme we have in these areas over the next number of years. It was a very quick run through it but I would be happy to answer any questions.