Liz McManus (Wicklow, Labour)

I welcome the inclusion of amendment No. 23. It goes as far as anybody would expect a Minister to go in terms of the issues I raised about protecting children. I appreciate that the Minister has taken the points on board. I will withdraw my amendment in support of his.

It is telling that we have the functions of the authority set out in an amendment on Report Stage. It took approximately seven years to produce the Bill. The forum report on which it is based was produced in 2002, yet it has taken until Report Stage of the Bill in 2009 to draw up the final list of the authority's functions. I wonder at this whole process. We are adding on further responsibilities to a body the Minister now confesses is not expected to cost any more than the existing broadcasting commission. The authority is not going to take on additional staff, yet more and more functions are being added to the list of functions. I have my doubts about this.

We are now living in some kind of alternative reality when one considers, for example, that a report has to be made to the Minister in respect of preparedness for analogue switch-off. It is a bit late in the day. The switch-off that is occurring in Britain in a few months will have a severe impact on the east coast of Ireland. We were promised that would be addressed and RTE has made certain commitments, but, as to producing a report, that kind of work should have been done at an earlier stage. To include that point in a list of functions bears out the original point I made about the need to have some kind of convergence in terms of regulation because much of this area is technical and relates to developments in communications.

I apologise for being so late in raising this issue but it only arose recently. The ability of people to appeal a decision by the authority is of fundamental importance to a contractor or operator. In this instance, a radio station serving Cavan and Monaghan was opened in 1989 and went on the airwaves at a particular frequency that it is very close to a new station, 4FM. It is so close that significant interference has been caused to the local station by the arrival of 4FM, which means for the first time in 20 years parts of east Cavan, including Virginia and Ballyjamesduff, are no longer able to hear their local station. That is something that should not happen but it did happen.

When Northern Sound complained, the response from the BCI was pretty amazing: "Both stations will suffer some interference, but this is the price to pay to give the diversity in programming that the BCI strive to offer." That is not fair and it is not acceptable. That is not a decent reply for somebody living in Ballyjamesduff who has lost their local station. As far as I can see, what happened is that nobody thought out the technical problems that would arise by granting a licence. I am not a technical person so I cannot make a judgment other than that, but it is quite clear that people have lost out. The local station is concerned about the BCI's decision but there is no method of appeal. In terms of the authority's functions, how can that issue, first, be prevented in the future and, second, if such a situation arises again, what are the means of appealing to protect the public interest? It seems to me that sometimes decisions are made at the centre that do not relate to the particular problems people experience on the ground.

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