David Norris (Independent)

It is perfectly reasonable from time to time for there to be criticism of it, but we should not destroy public service broadcasting here, as has happened in other countries. We need only look next door to Britain and the way the Government there tried to undermine the BBC. We should not let that happen here. We get a very good service from the national broadcaster. When we want to highlight issues, such as the referendum on Europe, we rely on RTE. If we did not have it and only had the commercial stations, we would never get a message across. We also need to generate employment in our own local programming, script writing and acting. We should not weaken what is a great national institution simply because of some momentary irritation. That would be fatal.