Mr. Terence O'Rourke:

I am a chartered accountant and have previously been chair of the audit committees of organisations like Hibernia REIT plc and The Irish Times. Noreen O’Kelly has joined the board. She is an experienced accountant and was the former company secretary of Independent News and Media, was on the board of ESB for ten years until she stepped down last year and was chairman of the audit committee of ESB for ten years. She is now chairing the audit committee. I attend all of the committees as well. I believe we have sufficient expertise.

Boards can always be strengthened. Since last June, there have been 16 members of the board. Half of the board are new in the last year, so we now have a good board and we will further strengthen it. We are looking at our skill sets. For example, I am very conscious of the fact we have nobody on the current board who has a good understanding of Irish language issues. I would like to get somebody else onto the board to deal with that as it is something that is missing at the moment.

There is the financial aspect but another thing that is important to our board is people with experience of large companies. RTÉ is a large company with €300 million in revenues. There were not enough people on our board who had experience of dealing with large companies and the kind of issues that arise in managing and overseeing large companies. We are better now. We have a few more people who have been involved in bigger companies but we probably need to strengthen that further.