Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

Regarding the cameraman on "Fair City", or many people in operations who are concerned, I would come back to the point the Deputy just made, which is really important. This is a voluntary exit scheme. Nobody is going to be thrown out the door. That is not the way we are going to run this. Second, there will be extensive continuing consultation with staff. One of the reasons we wanted to publish the strategy framework in November, which set out the key points of the strategy, was so that staff had a chance to be consulted initially, which they were. That will continue as we try to roll out the strategy. We will explore options on things like "Fair City" in terms of how we make it. Do we make it on a wholly independent basis? Do we make on an independent studio lot but use RTÉ people involved in it? Those are the sort of things we will explore and staff will be involved in those discussions. There are other options. Sometimes when organisations move content to the independent sector, they enable people to go to work for the independent for a year or two and pay and them as RTÉ staff but working for the independent so they can see what it is like and decide whether they want to take an exit package and move there or come back to RTÉ. These are the things we are exploring and will explore over five years. All we can look back at is the most recent voluntary exit schemes, the number of applications and the number of retirements we know we have coming up in the next five years. Those numbers easily exceed 400 if you look at the number who did not voluntary exit when they applied for it and add on the retirements. Not all of those people can go but a lot of people have been interested so far. For some people, it is quite tempting. We have said we are going to try to open a voluntary exit scheme this year for 40 people so we can start changing the organisation. Part of that will seeing how many people are interested initially in expressing an interest in voluntary exit.