Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

A number of Departments were contracted over the years to newspaper services and outside media monitoring units. We effectively stopped that in 1997. It was a very large cost. The entire media communications unit was cheaper than the cost at that stage. We could extend the service to include regional newspapers, but this is a small unit of five people covering 18 hours per day five days per week, and they provide a service to several hundred officials across the Departments. We could possibly double the service and cover everything, but it might then have too many people involved. I am not too sure we could do that on a——

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