Mr. Michael Kelly:

Independent radio stations remain hugely popular in Ireland. However, the advertising landscape in Ireland has undergone major disruption. Tech giants and social media platforms now extract approximately €1 billion in advertising revenue from the Irish market each year. Unlike traditional broadcasters, they face minimal obligations when it comes to curbing harmful, misleading or false content. In contrast, we in radio are committed to quality journalism in a world, unfortunately, full of misinformation. We have highly trained and professional people. We take our responsibilities with regard to fairness, accuracy and balance extremely seriously and have a proud record of protecting and serving listeners.

Our members have responded to the undoubted economic challenges by investing and innovating and as SMEs, we are agile and nimble. We wish to play a continued role in providing high-quality news and current affairs information, and we want to provide a platform for proper exploration of issues. However, we do face undoubted economic challenges. Our sector’s key requirement is a level playing field, along with a fair and proportionate support scheme to strengthen news and current affairs. At present, independent stations receive less than one third of 1% of the total annual Exchequer funding allocated to the media.

We broadly welcome the Bill and the promised funding for news and current affairs. However, there are some improvements we consider critical. I first refer to the need for the ring-fencing of funding for the uniquely regulated independent radio broadcasting sector, so that the role of our sector is recognised by changes to the one-size-fits-all or platform neutral nature of journalism schemes currently. Instead, we propose recognition of the special and differing responsibilities of our sector. The second point is about removing the impossible obstacle of additionality, currently seen in restrictions of funding to narrow or new categories, which excludes our experienced newsroom teams involved in core news and current affairs in favour of temporary contracts. What additionality or confining funding to new or restricted output means is an arbitrary concept that means all of the excellent work currently done by our journalists, editors, current affairs presenters and producers, researchers, and others in our sector bringing top class services 24-7, 365 days per year, are not deemed to qualify for any support whatsoever.

Our members are already required to provide news and current affairs content as part of their services. The facts are that they consistently exceed those licensing requirements. The members will be familiar with the amount of airtime dedicated by their own local stations to the most recent local, European and general elections. In the local elections last year, for example, a total of 436 hours of election counts and results coverage took place across our 34 independent stations. We believe any review of public service content must include proportionate representation for our sector. We hope the review can be brought forward and could also include emergency information during crises, which is what we do so well.