Liz McManus (Wicklow, Labour)

I support the proposal outlined in Deputy Coveney's amendments. None of us can devise the perfect system, but that does not mean we should avoid the issue. I imagine that the current system of television licence fee collection dates back to a time when many households did not have television sets. It might have been appropriate then, but that is no longer the case. If we do not address the idea that we should maintain a quaint system of collection, even after the traditional one-off television set in the corner of the sitting room has been by-passed by technology, we will continue to get an inefficient return on the money that is spent. There seems to be a kind of acceptance that there is not much point in going after a certain percentage of people, because they will not buy a television licence anyway. It seems that the notion that certain people cannot afford to buy a licence or are determined not to pay, whereas more law-abiding people will pay when they are required to do so, is now part of the system. However, this does not take recent technological changes into account. Our idea of what constitutes a computer or a television set is changing. Deputy Stagg asked me to raise the case of a person who has a small black and white television set in the corner of his or her holiday home or caravan in a place like Ballymoney. Will such a person have to continue to buy a television licence even though he or she is there for just three months of the year? The use of the television set in question would not justify such an outlay. The annual licence fee would probably cost more than the television set.

This issue needs to be addressed. These amendments represent an honest effort to add some urgency to the need to do this. The alternative to confronting this problem, which has been raised many times, is to continue to talk about it indefinitely. I know the Minister will agree with what we have said. We have discussed this so often that I could almost recite the Minister's response at this stage. That would not solve this problem, however. The Minister's job is to solve problems of this nature when we meet them as the world evolves and technology advances. We should not be going through the motions. There is not a huge amount in this Bill, to be honest. The new structure that is being put in place will have many of the functions of the old structure. We need to modernise the way we collect funds to pay for public service broadcasting. That is absolutely essential to our future. We all must ensure that public service broadcasting has a really good future. If we continue to fund it through the television licence fee system or some other structure, we can ensure its future is assured. However, we have to ensure the system operates on some kind of efficient basis. We do not have such a basis at the moment.

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