Mr. Donnacha McKeon:

At the moment of live proceedings right now, part-time workers are hugely important. They are sitting in a gallery over there and they are controlling the cameras and putting up the graphics. They are putting up members' name supers and making sure all the information is on the screen. However, behind them there is an entire ecosystem that gives them the tools that allow them to do that in that moment of live proceedings. There is engineering and production. The three cost centres that are in the contract are operation and production, technical and maintenance, and management and administration. Full-time staff are spread across all those cost centres. To give the Deputy an idea of hands-on operational stuff, right now, there are three part-time workers in the committee gallery looking after this particular meeting. Beyond that, there are at least three engineers who are in the central apparatus room, CAR, which makes sure that not only the stream from this room but the stream from all other rooms that are currently live get to the video router and from the video router get to the channel solution. In the channel solution, there are at least two full-time people working at the moment. They look after getting the signal via fibre to RTÉ, TG4 and Virgin Media and also the curation of the Oireachtas TV channel. The people who are actually in the control room at the moment are just doing it for this room. This room is part of a number of feeds that go into the Oireachtas TV channel and then at any one time, my Civil Service team, who are separate from Pi Comms, select what is actually going to be shown on the Oireachtas TV channel. While people can see everything live on the website, we have to make a choice for the channel because there is only one output on Sky, Virgin and TG4. Beyond that again then, they would have their own contract manager, their own production manager and an engineering consultant. Downstairs in the editing room there are two producers and two editors. There is a huge amount of work that goes on beyond the live proceedings, and that has to go on behind the live proceedings. As I said, in the moment, the part-time workers are a skilled, dedicated, vital cog in the machine, but there is a bigger machine and our remit and what we do goes beyond just the live proceedings. That ecosystem is there to service the live proceedings and everything else.