For the purpose of being positive in this debate, may I reply to an impression that might have been created in the Minister's contribution? I will do so without delay. When I was Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht with responsibility for broadcasting, I produced a Green Paper on Broadcasting – broadcasting in the future tense – which set out 50 questions I felt our policy would have to answer before we could introduce legislation. I later produced the heads of the legislation as approved by Government, and these were published in the document entitled Fócas Geal – Clear Focus. In that document there is a clear indication of that on which I had approval from Government. The changes that would have been made would have been of a constitutional kind or in response to representations made after the publication of the heads of legislation. It dealt with, for example, the transition from digital and it advised strongly in favour of the establishment of the Broadcasting Commission which would come into existence to take control of transmission, thereby satisfying all the European arguments about competition and fairness and, in turn, assuring fairness to any clients using the transmission system.
The document also referred to the need to define public service broadcasting in a new way, a point to which I will return. Page 49, No. 5 of the English version of the document which was published, as was the Green Paper, dhá theangach, in Irish and in English, states: ". . . to arrange for the provision and maintenance of a broadcast transmission system, or systems, commensurate with the development of relevant technologies".
I hope what I have to say this evening will be positive but it will indicate the crisis we are now facing. I said last night, and I repeat now, that it is impossible to take a decision in relation to transmission or in relation to the division of transmission from multiplex management without it having implications for public service broadcasting. If I were in the Minister's position now I would ask myself the question: how can we ensure, as there seems to be a consensus in the House, that there will be programmes that will reflect our own cultural identity, they will be sufficiently broadly based and will be of a nature that we will be able to see ourselves in them? Perhaps it is a modern version of the famous description of broadcasting on the other island as a nation talking to itself.
What is happening now will make that very difficult because if the Minister wants to revise broadcasting and make changes in the legislation already introduced, she should direct her attention to the fact that she needs to make public service broadcasting safe, even before she commercialises the transmission of multiplex management systems. I will give an example of the reason for that, and it is drawn from international experience in relation to where these changes have taken place.
The nature of a television product or a programme is that it is a joint consumed object, by which I mean it is consumed not only where it is made but by every country to which the programme is sold. The United States, for example, which makes 75% of all programmes in English, has the advantage of having a very large English speaking market, the second language spoken in the world. It has a massive market, therefore, it can have initial high production costs and it has very low incremental costs. With that capacity, one can invest in a high grade production with high grade production values and can afford to flog it across the world at very little incremental cost. That explains the reason there is such a complete deluge of such programmes across the television viewing spectrum.
How can we make public service broadcasting safe in such an environment? We can never make it safe but there should be a massive investment in programming and the definition in the legislation should be that the public service broadcaster, the national broadcaster, is principally a programme maker. If we can do that, it would be replied to immediately by international market forces which are putting a new spin on the word "localisation" by which they mean taking a product that is produced, say, in a large market like the United States and allowing a kind of local packet to give it locale, in the same way as McDonalds allow their restaurants to be localised. It is an abuse of the word "localised" but it is an inevitable extension of the "McDonaldisation" of the world.
I come now to my net political point. It is important that the Minister explains what she means when she says that she will defend public service broadcasting. She can best do so by ensuring programme making capacity. She will have to fund it, but how will she do that? In my last proposals to Government for an increase in the licence fee I indexed that rise and it would be more today than the net deficit in RTE. That was never revoked by Cabinet decision but the Minister said she disagrees with it and she will not implement it. That indexation would be worth what the deficit is today, but I want to move on from that.
In the likelihood of there being no indexation and no rise in the licence fee, RTE then has to turn to whatever assets it has available to it. Last night I posed questions which I will not repeat because of time constraints. I presume the Minister, when replying to the debate, will give us the history of the transmission system and the legality that governs frequencies, both in international and national law. The Minister cannot sell or instruct to sell that which she does not own. This is all about scarce frequency management. The pressure of the "McDonaldisation" of broadcasting is to suggest that we will have an open season once we have abolished regulation and scarcity in frequencies.
There is another question I have not time to go into but it indicates the hand of those who are interested in multiplex management purchase, that is, are they going for digitalisation to improve picture quality, for example, such as high definition television? Will they improve the image? That is very interesting. The telephone companies did not go for improving the quality of what one hears on a telephone. They went for more and more people, with reduced quality, listening to mobile telephones. In exactly the same way this issue is about acquiring more space to lash out more product, and all this is about programming.
The Minister also promised in her legislation that she would deal with the issue of cross-ownership. In my legislation, in a Private Members' Bill, I proposed to deal with Article 3A of the Amsterdam Treaty in relation to sporting rights. My amendment to the Competition Act put a limit on cross-ownership. There is nothing in the Broadcasting Bill which will deal with the issue of cross-ownership, and there is nothing to stop those with a dominant position or those who are abusing a dominant position in one medium straying into another.
What does all this tell us? It tells us something about my own departure from the Department where, rather vindictively, the Taoiseach and the Government decided to delete the word "culture" from the title of the Department – it was the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. With the disappearance of the word "culture" came an insistence on the "commodification" of everything, and the distinction between my appointments and my attitudes and policies in the Department and that of my successors was the arrival of commercial thinking, solely unmitigated.
We must accept that broadcasting is a cultural matter not amenable to sole regulation by market principles. We require a Minister with responsibility for broadcasting to be able to tell the colleague who is handling technical infrastructure that matters technical are matters technical, but matters about national identity and broadcasting—
