Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

——and if anything has been said by somebody who telephoned Mr. Joe Duffy's radio programme to which the Minister needs to reply? This is a nonsensical operation. The Taoiseach is now stating that in addition to the communications unit he will spend more public money on a contracted service to work on the media monitoring operation. Given that the Taoiseach acknowledges there is now a wider range of media, what is wrong with a system whereby an item is brought to the attention of the Minister or Department by a journalist and offers an opportunity to respond to it or by a member of the public who hears something on the radio in the morning or reads something in a newspaper about which he or she has a question and contacts the Department and the Department responds to it?

Why do we need a listening station? Why do we have this listening post? Why does the Government operate this MI5-type of operation on the media at taxpayers' expense when Ministers can listen to the radio themselves and read newspapers? If they hear about something they can look it up on the Internet or get a playback of the item, or someone can do so on their behalf, and they can respond to it. Why do we have media monitoring, centralised or otherwise, or contracted out or otherwise?

This is a waste of money. At a time when the Taoiseach is discussing cutting down the number of State agencies and cutting out waste in the public service I respectfully suggest to him that this is an area, albeit entailing relatively small public expenditure, that the taxpayer could do without. Instead of tendering for another contract for media monitoring the operation should be closed down. Let Ministers and Departments communicate with and respond to the media in the normal way.

See this speech in context