Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I am going to repeat many of the issues that we raised yesterday. In the first instance, one of the recommendations from the Future of Media Commission is that, following detailed scrutiny of RTÉ’s financial situation, the commission recommends that in advance of the introduction of a new public funding model in 2024, the Government should ensure that RTÉ is funded through a combination of television licence fee revenues and Exchequer contributions to the extent of €213 million in 2022 and €214 million in 2023. Does the Minister accept that recommendation?

The same couple of pages in the report talk about efficiencies in RTÉ and, unusually, talk about the potential retention or disposal of assets in RTÉ. I think all of us would hope we do not need to dispose of any more assets in RTÉ and I am a bit disappointed to see that written in the report. When it comes to efficiencies, I am conscious that RTÉ's operating costs in 2008 were about €439 million and in 2020 they were down at €308 million, so there is a pretty big reduction in operating costs in RTÉ, although I am obviously not forgetting the issues of freelance workers and bogus self-employment in Montrose. Nonetheless, it is to be borne in mind that there has been a reduction in operating costs when we call for a focus on efficiencies.

I also want to defend the call the Future of Media Commission has made in regard to general taxation. It has a lot of merit and it would probably be fairer and more progressive to have general taxation funding of our public service media. It would reduce prosecutions, given, as I said yesterday, 4,500 cases went to court in 2020. It would also lower collection costs, which are currently at €10 million. On the issue of the threat to independence that we hear about if we were to fund RTÉ from general taxation, we should not forget that TG4 is funded through general taxation and that the State covers through the household benefits package some 483,000 households at a cost of €70 million. Those are the reasons there is merit in the general taxation approach.

The working group that the Minister has set up and that is due to report in November has a lot of work to do to make up the loss which RTÉ has identified, which is €35 million due to no-television homes although this is a device-specific charge, and the loss of €30 million because of evasion. Its work is cut out for it to report by November on how we make up those losses under the current system.

I want to turn to community media, which rarely gets a shout out and sometimes, when it does, it is just confused with local commercial media. I want to put on the record of the House and welcome the fact the Future of Media Commission has identified the calls for increased public support for community media. CRAOL and the Community Television Association, CTA, have proposed the establishment of a community media support fund which would offer funding support, training and content production support. I was involved in Dublin Community Television when I was younger. It always relied on Sound and Vision funding and never received core funding support. I hope the committee will invite NEAR TV, NEAR FM, the NEAR Media Co-op and Dublin Digital Radio, which is a community radio station operated by members. I hope we can engage with them around their aspirations for funding. I want to put that on the record.

We spoke briefly about Article 15. Given the newspapers were in the Oireachtas calling for reform of the VAT rate, it is probably relevant today to go over that. We have seen in other jurisdictions, such as Australia and France, a rebalancing of the relationship between media and big tech, and how that can have profound implications for the sustainability and future of a vital, independent public interest journalism. I am talking about the remuneration of journalists and news outlets when their work is carried on Facebook, Google, Twitter and so on.In Australia, reforms have resulted in Meta announcing a AU$15 million fund to invest in public interest journalism and Google announcing a digital news academy that will fund 60, 12-month journalism trainees over three years. I wonder what are the projected economic or other benefits of the effective implementation of Article 15 to Irish publications. The report recommends that the assessment of the impact of the copyright directive be concluded and findings published within 12 months of the transposition of Article 15. Article 15 was transposed in November 2021 and the assessment and publication of findings is due to be completed by November 2022. Will the Minister inform us as to what stage the process is at? Anecdotal evidence suggests that the measures currently prescribed are not going to be enough to give effect to the primary aim of Article 15 and effectively redress the current imbalance between Irish publications and big tech. We need to see big tech companies engage in a real and meaningful way with Irish publishers. Is the Minister willing to step in if those engagements do not prove to be fruitful?

I have just one minute remaining. I am disappointed to see very little mention in the report of the future of the communications network that keeps Saorview going and the national infrastructure in 2RN. There is some mention of it, but 37% of households watch TV through Saorview. This is national infrastructure that is desperately underfunded. A lot of Irish homes receive BBC and international terrestrial channels through the Astra 2 satellite. Britain is probably going to switch off digital terrestrial television in 2034 so those homes will be without BBC and BBC NI. There are lots of conversations that we need to have about the future of digital terrestrial television. Obviously television is increasingly being delivered over broadband, but as we know, that infrastructure is not owned by the State. There is a long history there. The 2RN infrastructure is deeply underfunded at the moment and there are many years left in terms of people receiving TV over that network. They are the points I wish to put on the record.