Mr. Frank Mulrennan:

Chairman and members of the joint committee, I am the chief executive officer of Celtic Media Newspapers Limited, and I represent 98 colleagues who work in six newspaper centres in Mullingar, Athlone, Cavan, Navan, Tullamore and Castlebar. I am joined by Mr. Tadhg Carey, editor of the Westmeath Independentand Offaly Independentnewspapers, which have a proud heritage in providing good journalism and solid community coverage since 1846. Mr. Carey will make some opening remarks in a few moments.

Having been a journalist for the first 18 years of my career, I have a great commitment to editors having full autonomy in their decision making. I have secured full guarantees that this editorial independence will continue under our newspaper titles when the sale to Independent News and Media is approved. For the past 16 years, I have been managing local newspaper titles and I have seen our industry go from the Celtic tiger years when high prices were paid, primarily by British investors, for local Irish newspapers to a position in which, since 2008, the business model in local newspapers is broken.

Our company and the jobs of 98 colleagues earning more than €4.2 million in salaries almost went out of business in 2012 due to the weight of bank debts and continually falling revenues. My colleagues were extremely supportive of the management buy-out which I led in 2012 and under which their jobs and 950 years of newspaper history were secured. It is important to make the joint committee aware that we took the very progressive decision to allocate 25% of the equity in the company from the management buy-out to our editors, sales managers and a production manager. Mr. Carey is one of the beneficiaries of this decision.

We borrowed €5.5 million in June 2012 in the teeth of recession. Five years later, we are faced with a broken business model in terms of publishing local newspapers or, dare I say it, newspapers in general. For this reason, we ask members to approach this sale approval process with an open mind and to ignore the considerable noise around this issue in the national media, which has nothing to do with the job security of my colleagues.

While I have great regard for the contribution of our media academics, I respectfully suggest that the tone of today's contributions would be different if we had an economic consultant or business analyst before the joint committee because we are dealing with tough commercial reality. For example, since 2008 the regional newspaper industry, the business in which I work, has suffered a 65% fall in print advertising and a 35% fall in circulation revenues. I take Dr. Flynn's point about the health of the business prior to that time. Since 2008, however, only one investment has been made in local newspapers, namely, when Johnston Press was sold in 2014. Nobody else has seen fit to invest in local newspapers since. While there has been major growth in digital advertising, three quarters of this growth is going to Facebook and Google.

I respectfully suggest that the interests of my colleagues and the future of our newspapers will be best protected through being part of a larger company with funds to invest in a digital platform and marketing. I know the company in question will provide the editorial independence that I want to protect. I ask members to bear in mind that this sale was approved by the Competition and Consumer Protection Authority at the first stage because there is no overlap in the titles. While the sale is very important to the Celtic Media Group, members should note that it only adds 3% to the circulation of Independent News and Media.

If Dr. Foley will excuse me, I wish to correct a point he made. The number of titles involved in this sale when it is approved is not 28 but 20 and a good number of the titles are small. There are two other fine companies in the local newspaper companies, namely, Iconic Newspapers, which as 13 titles, and Landmark Media. My colleagues are in the process of making submissions to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and do so of their own accord. I understand our sales team is making a collective submission and that my 20 pre-press colleagues in Mullingar will also make a collective submission. Others are making submissions off their own bat because they know the future of our company is best protected by being part of a larger company with a digital force.

The titles concerned are the five local newspapers in the group, namely, the Westmeath Independent, theWestmeath Examiner, The Anglo-Celt, the Meath Chronicle and theConnaught Telegraph, as well as our two free newspapers, the Offaly Independent and Forum. We have seen newspapers close and I want to protect against further closures. With that, I will hand over to Mr. Carey.