Mr. Gavin Deans:

We are here today to answer any of those questions. We have the detail and when we look back over two years ago, it was not around then but looking at the detail, people are now been able to answer those questions.

My colleague Mr. Mullen looks after compliance. From an RTÉ point of view, compliance is much more of a huge effort from ourselves to ensure what we do around sponsorship. There are committees that include all areas of the business to look at the type of sponsorship we take on particular shows. We can go into that. When we look at the numbers around advertising in general, and, as the Cathaoirleach said, it is a big part, we have to play within the commercial role of the overall organisation to fund RTÉ so we have to maximise everything we can do on that.

The policies the Government has set over the past number of years has also changed the type of advertiser that has advertised. In 2019, motors accounted for approximately 10% of revenue. That has dropped down to 6% of our total revenue. According to the most recent car registrations that came out in January, and again halfway through the year, and if we look at June until the start of September, just over 50% of all car advertising was all to do with fully electric or hybrid vehicles. More than 80% of that advertising completely covered off all of the motor advertising so the motor companies are driving that message because that is what is working for them from a consumer and market point of view. They changed that.

Likewise, we look at other advertisers, whether they are sponsors or different advertisers, for example, energy companies not advertising in the way they used to. They are advertising retrofitting, wind, electric and all of those elements. We have seen a huge shift in the actual advertising itself and the models. We looked across all of the advertising from even a sponsorship point of view and more than 70% of the sponsorship that is attributed to that is all environmentally focused. The clients have changed that.

I sit in a number of meetings with different clients and their focus is on this agenda, not on diesel or petrol. They are trying to shift for their own business reasons and for environmental reasons. We are working with them to make sure we are not greenwashing, which is a very hard thing to prove. When we get into a sponsorship deal, we do not allow a sponsor to come into a show that does not fit. There is a body within RTÉ that does this. I do not sit on this body. The way in which we do that is to make sure we are doing the right advertising to the right market and to try to drive that.