Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action
The Role of Media in Climate Action: Discussion
11:00 am
Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
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I thank Ms McCarthy. I am somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of attention to advertising in her statement. There was one mention of it. I understand Mr. O'Callaghan will answer in respect of advertising, but I would have thought that her statement would really focus on the challenge relating to advertising and climate.
As politicians, we regularly go on national media, including RTÉ, and are interrogated about climate policy. We pull and drag against each other in many ways and there are many differences over policy but then it would cut to the ad break. We are there listening and the ad break is advertising bigger cars that are inefficient and other fossil fuel products. It seems that advertising is influencing consumer behaviour. More than €1 billion is spent on advertising in Ireland every year because it works. It is not quite enough to say that RTE adheres to all of the standards that are in place. We are trying to find out and the reason we have invited RTÉ back is we had a session two years ago that was not satisfactory because it did not deal with advertising sufficiently. The wrong people were sent in. This time we explicitly asked for the discussion to be about advertising and this is what we wanted to deal with. It seems from Ms McCarthy's opening statement that she has barely touched on it. It is the primary focus of this meeting. I ask if she would like to respond to that and to acknowledge that this is a huge challenge, which we are trying to address. We would like to know what RTÉ's way of addressing that is?