Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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This is interesting. Multiple Bills which should be interwoven are going through the Houses at the moment. There is the copyright directive, this Bill and a letter we have to deal with tomorrow at some stage which deals exactly with the point Mr. Dooley made about media mergers. It is one to give effect to the European Media Freedom Act, but we have not taken a decision on that, so the witnesses might be back in here sooner than they think to deal with it. One of the problems is that not all of the legislation is coming before this committee. We have to try to make sure that the message goes out there that we have to protect public broadcasting and public media into the future. It has shot itself in the foot so often in recent years, including before this committee only recently.

Mr. O'Brien or Mr. Keegan might be able to answer this, but RTÉ appeared before us and we were asking about workers' rights, contracts and whether RTÉ was asking performers to waive their rights to future residuals or for guaranteed work. Is that a practice that is happening at the moment? The RTÉ head of regulatory service started to tell me that was not happening but someone cut across her and she never finished what she was saying. I do not know what the practice is.