Mr. Bob Hughes:

I thank the Cathaoirleach, Deputies and Senators for the opportunity to address them today. I am the executive director of Local Ireland, the association that represents 36 print newspapers and their digital channels across the country. The regional news publishing sector continues to face serious challenges with circulation continuing to fall at 8.3% year-on-year between 2023 and 2024, while advertising revenue is flat after catastrophically plummeting more than 50% over the past 15 years. Employment has fallen at the same rate over that period. Ironically, it is important to state that despite those challenges, our readership and relevance has never been so great thanks to our digital presence, which has seen significant growth year-on-year. Our importance for local democracy, the administration of justice and promoting cohesion and identity for our communities was recognised by the Future of Media Commission. As a result of its recommendations, several schemes have either begun or are in train under Coimisiún na Meán, which are now available to support regional news publishers for the first time in the history of the State, where previously supports of this kind were only available to broadcasters.

While the Bill deals mainly with broadcasting, it contains some important measures, in particular the media fund, which will replace the broadcasting fund. It is welcome that this Bill plans to put the media fund on a statutory basis. However, there are concerns that the allocation of 7% of the licence fee as a basis for the media fund is insufficient given that more media organisations, both print and digital, will be applying for funding under the schemes. The local democracy and courts reporting schemes are welcome, but the first round was heavily oversubscribed. Equally, the forthcoming scheme for digital transformation is likely to be insufficient to meet the needs of all media that it seeks to serve. The Bill states that the Minister will have the opportunity to augment funding for the schemes beyond the 7% but clearly this could be subject to the vagaries of the economy and available budget from the Department of Finance. It does not make sense that if funding via Coimisiún na Meán has been broadened to include news publishers, and more media organisations are competing for the same percentage allocation as before, that it remains at 7%.

Local Ireland strongly supports other aspects of the Bill, particularly those designed to promote inclusivity around gender, race, minority communities, people with disabilities and the Irish language. We also welcome the inclusion of geography as a key criteria for supporting underserved communities. We also agree that public service content providers in print and online should be subject to editorial codes and standards, in our case the Press Council, and that user-generated content should always be subject to an editorial process. Professional, credible and trusted media needs to be supported. For Local Ireland members, it means support through the provision of schemes via the coimisiún and a fair share of Government, State agency and local authority public information as opposed to political advertising. That is not always happening. There should also be fairer remuneration from the big tech platforms for the use of our content both as a source of content creation and as the basis for AI learning and we want to see the reform of defamation legislation enacted as soon as possible. I thank the committee for listening and I am happy to answer any questions members might have.