Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I thank Senators for their support for the Oireachtas and Irish film channels, which will have difficult births in these economic circumstances. The former is a matter for the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, which has been considering which mechanism to use to put the channel together and to transmit it. Whether RTE will transmit the channel is not certain. Understandably, a number of people have been arguing that they might be able to process and manage the system, but the mechanism is yet to be decided.

The discussions to date have been to the effect that the funding would need to come from the budget of the Oireachtas. This poses a difficulty, since our budgets have been cut. However, we should rise to the challenge because being transparent, open and available would be of more interest than anything else. It would benefit our work and provide a good service to the people with relatively little expense. Given that we already have cameras and a sound system, the costs would be low and we could bring in many feeds from other parliaments, including the European Parliament, European Council meetings and so on. A stream of information on political meetings is available for broadcast at a low cost compared with other programming. This point should drive us to deliver the channel now that we have provided for it legislatively.

The film channel should be equally as cheap in terms of its transmission and editing process, although not in its quality. A large archive of digitally recorded material is available to us and, at a low cost, we could tap into a range of international and Irish films and broadcast them in a way that would build an audience. My initial instinct was not to include advertising, but I wanted to keep it as an option, given our commercial difficulties and the tightness in the budget of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, from which the channel's money would come. I did not want a lack of advertising to block the station's establishment. We will need to determine whether this would be possible in the budgetary process but, if necessary, the channel will carry advertising to cover its budget.