Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I remember when I lived in London in the mid-1980s thinking I might not return to live here and having a sinking feeling as I watched the BBC news in my flat in west London. Even though I had grown up watching the BBC news, as we had that channel at home, living on the east coast, I thought then for the first time that BBC News was biased in the sense that it did not give me the full picture. RTE was not available to me and on BBC News I got only half the picture or half the story of my country. That had a profound effect on me. That is when I had a sense that I was living in a foreign country.

I say that for two reasons, first, because I fully support and understand the proposal of providing Irish services to our emigrants in the UK who have a connection with this country and, second, it makes the important point that we need to have control, ownership and possession of our free-to-air Irish broadcasting services to ensure we do not lose control of that most important part of our civic and State life. I refer to the ability to communicate to each other and to have access to news which we, rather than Rupert Murdoch or another corporate individual, control.

I commend the proposal to provide services for those in the UK. Perhaps through amendments on Committee Stage we can discuss what proposals the Minister considers most appropriate to meet the aspiration that has been set. It is instructive that an earlier attempt to do this failed on a commercial basis. I am not saying the services should be commercial but we should be canny in how we spend our money. Those services, by nature, would not be ones to which royalty rights issues attach, rather they would be programmes that could be selected from RTE, TG4 or TG3, and possibly could be provided on a free satellite service in the UK or in combination with the web access service. That may be a cheaper way to provide universal coverage of services in the UK rather than free-to-air digital services, which might be more expensive. I would be interested to hear the Minister's view on the best channels of communication to achieve that and the cost implications. Has the Department an indicative outline of the cost of the various solutions or ways of distributing the services? While all Members here support the provisions as set out, it is important to be clear from the start about what we are talking rather than being aspirational and not committing ourselves because we do not know the possible costs or implications.

The provision of services here is complicated by the availability of other platforms. That 70% of households here are on either a cable or satellite service has an obvious effect. Furthermore, the fact that we will go through a transition period where those households who do not have that service will lose the British channels they currently receive by dint of geographical spillover is a significant development and complicates the issue before us as to how we plan our own free-to-air services. I contend that in two years' time, as Deputy Broughan said and as Mr. Cathal Goan pointed out, some 88,000 families in the Leinster area will lose that multichannel television they have had for at least the 40 years I have been here. This is of some consequence.

We should ensure we have a strong free-to-air service. If we plan for a free-to-air service which only contains the four existing Irish channels, such a service will not lose out to the alternative platforms, be they satellite or cable, which can carry the full array of channels. We should plan in this legislation for solutions which ensure a free-to-air service that attracts a reasonable viewership, even if it is not the full percentage of our population, to make it viable or justifiable. The solution would be to adopt a North-South — the Minister intimated this in reply to questions earlier in the week — all-Ireland approach, possibly on a free-to-air digital service, to the provision of the main public sector broadcasting channels, BBC 1, BBC 2, RTE 1, RTE 2 and possibly ITV and TV3, although I recognise there are difficulties with including TV3 and ITV in terms of royalty issues, North and South. I strongly contend that we need such an all-Ireland dimension to make sure we have a strong free-to-air service, although not necessarily to compete with NTL or Sky. They offer a different package, namely, a plethora of sports and other add-on adjunct channels.

I do not believe a free-to-air service would survive on just the four Irish channels themselves. I suggest that we should be doing something similar to what we have just passed in the energy area and to what will hopefully pass through the House of Lords next week. We should be looking at all-island solution, whereby ComReg, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, RTE, Ofcom and other bodies in the North, as well both Governments, can come together to manage the development of an all-Ireland free-to-air service. If this happens, people in Belfast and Derry can readily access Irish channels, while we might also be able to carry some UK public service channels on our free-to-air service. That would provide the type of free-to-air service that people are used to in Ireland. Without such a development, the free-to-air service will not hold up and we may push many of our new customers in rural areas towards Sky and cable. This will leave us without any free-to-air service that provides an independent State-controlled guaranteed broadcasting transmission network.

I will table amendments on this issue on Committee Stage and I will be interested to hear the Minister's views. There is an urgency about all this as we will be losing our current analogue services in two years' time. If that is to happen, we should try to get a better alternative. When dealing with ComReg's spectrum management and the possibility of the BCI as a future all-Ireland regulator, it is apparent that there is a cross-over in responsibilities. If we create a single regulatory structure, with very clearly defined and separate divisions within it, we might follow the Ofcom model in the UK where the spectrum licensing was held in a broadly defined broadcasting regulator.

I do not understand why the Department has engaged in pilot testing. This technology is developing all over Europe, including Northern Ireland, and I do not see the technological reason for the Department to do it. I do not even know why it rather than an outside body is doing it. We should also legislate to insist on the availability of a political channel in any Irish free-to-air service or for any free-to-air services overseas. We have to take seriously the opening up of these Houses and the Oireachtas committees. We should be legislating for that now so that one of the multiplexes opens up the work we do here. That is the right step in the democratic process.

See this speech in context