Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I would like to comment on a briefing held in the audiovisual room about the community sponsorship Ireland refugee programme. I encourage all Members to reach out to their various communities, including refugees, direct provision centres, and asylum seekers. This programme aims to engage, protect, empower and create a more inclusive community, and ensure that our communities can benefit from people who come here seeking our assistance, support and sanctuary. Such people will ultimately enhance, enrich, empower and create a better Ireland, community and people. As time goes on, our young people will, hopefully, benefit from the wisdom and experiences of the new Irish who come here and who are welcomed by the vast majority of people.

We will have a debate about RTÉ later, which is welcome as it has a significant role to play in public service broadcasting in this country. There are many strands to RTÉ such as Raidió na Gaeltachta, TG4, and Lyric FM. It was great to meet staff from Lyric FM, who made the station great in Limerick, in the audiovisual room earlier.They are aware that this debate is taking place. There has to be a recalibration of the mindset within RTÉ about the importance of the arts and culture to this country. There are thousands of citizens, unwittingly or for whatever reason, who have not got a television licence. People nowadays move houses many times and end up finding themselves without a television licence. There should be some sort of an incentive for people to actually get into the system such as a discount for people taking out a television licence for the first time. This would involve many thousands of people and would generate a significant amount of money for RTÉ. It would bring people into the television licence realm until such time as we see proper and decent reform of funding of public service broadcasting.