Ms Deirdre McCarthy:

I will add in there that we have just finished research with the audiences and focus groups in the last month, very specifically on climate change. From a news and current affairs perspective we track and record our climate change coverage stories. We have done so for the last year and a half. We know exactly what we are doing, what areas we are covering and where the challenges are from the audience perspective. However, the most recent research indicates it is a huge challenge. There is a huge amount of ambivalence in the audience towards the climate crisis and climate change - their role in it and whose role and responsibility it is - and there is also a huge amount of resistance to it insofar as they do not care, it is nothing to do with them and it is somebody else's problem.

We recognise that. That is still a major challenge for public sector media companies. We might ask what we can do to try to take a different approach to the way we tell the stories on climate change. It is a balance because, first of all, what we are there to do is report impartial, accurate news. However, there is also a need to try to explain the climate change story. What the audience tells us is guiding us in how we are trying to tell those stories and connect them to the audience. What digital has done is disrupt everything, including how we connect to younger audiences and newer audiences in particular. There is a big question around trust and verifying the sourcing and the verification of stories. People ask why they should trust us and why they should trust mainstream media. What we must try to achieve in all this is to reach those younger audiences and convince them that they should trust us and show them how we verify and how it is so-----