Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

The Senators make strong arguments and Senator O'Reilly's offer of visits from the Dalai Lama is a clever means of enticing me towards a certain thinking. However, this involves a principle and I do not believe it is absurd to maintain a balance in our broadcasting between obvious commercial interests and our interests which are to represent the viewing public.

This involves a general principle as to what nature of public broadcaster we want. There is a possibility of moving towards a model we see in other countries, such as the United States and elsewhere, where advertising has a far more dominant position. I do not believe making a move in this direction would serve the Irish viewing and listening public well.

I quite like listening to and watching some advertisements. One can pick up a sense of what is going on culturally as much from the advertisements as from the programme. I am not against advertising or commercial and public sector broadcasters raising income from the showing of advertisements. However, it has its place and should not dominate our programming. One of the means by which we maintain this is by having a principle of a limit in the hour. To weaken this principle is to immediately invite all types of special circumstances for which one could argue but which would fundamentally alter the balance.

There is a world of a difference between advertising at 5.10 p.m. and 6.10 p.m. just after the news or advertising in the few minutes prior to a major football game and advertising an hour earlier. Any flexibility, the likes of which is suggested in this amendment, would lead to a distorted situation where we would see intensive advertising at key points when advertising is valuable being made up by quieter times when the station has a fraction of the viewers. Once this is allowed, the commercial instinct will drive towards an intense concentration of advertising at peak periods. These peak periods can be precise and measurable. It is right for us to maintain a principle of ten minutes per hour and 15% of programming of the day. While I listened with interest to the persuasive arguments of the Senators, I am not persuaded.