I was invited at short notice, so I will speak off-the-cuff. I thank the committee for the opportunity to attend today's meeting. I was interested to see the deliberations of last week's meeting. I was somewhat disappointed although not surprised that we did not get an invitation to attend.
City Channel is a privately funded organisation that is in the process of creating a small local television network. We are four years in operation since October 2005 and the business is making some inroads in the television industry in this country. That is against a difficult commercial backdrop and against serious competition. The landscape has been totally dominated by the national broadcaster for the past 50 or so years. There are significant players in multichannel land in the shape of companies such as Sky and the domestic commercial network, TV3, which appeared before the committee last week. The State also supports the TG4 operation. As we see it, the landscape is dominated by State-funded or taxpayer-funded operations which we also see as a mandatory tax on individuals in this country regardless of one's circumstances. One has to pay for a television licence irrespective of whether one watches RTE. The bulk of that fee, save for a small amount of money which goes to the sound and vision fund, goes to RTE for it to run its business. The sound and vision fund equates to approximately 7.5% of the licence fee. A total of 51% of that goes on programming that ends up on RTE. That in itself is ludicrous.
The broadcasting of the deliberations of the Dáil and Seanad is interesting. We do not have, or as yet have not sought access to the feed of the Dáil and Seanad. The Chairman can correct me because I may be wrong but if we do so we have to supply the method of getting it to our channel and take on the opportunity as to what commercial activity we could do to put it on our channel. We would be happy to broadcast selected transmissions from the Dáil and Seanad.
What we do voluntarily and without receiving a State subsidy of any kind is to transmit the deliberations of Dublin City Council. On a monthly basis we receive recorded highlights of the council meetings. We put our own presenter in at our own expense. We edit those highlights and we transmit the deliberations virtually every second day until the next month. We have made a similar proposal to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council for our Dublin Channel and we intend to make the same proposal to Cork City Council and Cork County Council for our Cork transmission which is called Channel South. We feel it is important that information channels such as ours, as well as entertainment channels, should carry those deliberations on a voluntary basis. It is extraordinary that an operation that is funded by the taxpayer and controlled to a great extent by the Minister does not comply with a correct standard of transmission of Oireachtas programming.
David McRedmond made a good point. When he was asked whether Oireachtas transmission made for entertaining programming he said, "not in the slightest". I am not being in any way personal or trying to cast a different light on it in saying it is not particularly an entertaining programming and in the context of what TV3 tries to do it does not sit comfortably. However, it is important from a democratic point of view that all of the deliberations of committees, the Dáil and Seanad should be available to the wider public when they take place.
I do not know how much the Dáil and Seanad vote to record and transmit on a narrow-cast basis and on the Internet the deliberations of committees such as this and the Houses but I can only imagine it is a substantial amount of money. For a very insubstantial amount of money the Oireachtas could have its own channel on cable, be on UPC's two channels, NTL and Chorus and, for a modest amount of money, be available on Sky. It is beyond my comprehension why there has not been a C-SPAN style channel in this country for some time. The content is available, it is only a question of putting it up there. It is a very inexpensive thing to do. Anyone who tells the committee differently is leading it up the garden path.
There is a simple, non-technically difficult way for the Oireachtas to have its own channel. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, famously said it would be better than some of the rubbish that is currently available. That is a separate issue. With the right level of investment, which, believe me, is modest, and access to the networks, which is utterly achievable, and with the intention to do so the Oireachtas could have its own output within the space of six months. It is beyond my comprehension why no one has attacked that in the correct manner.
If one examines the electronic programme guides, EPG, 101, 102, and 103 are all taken up by RTE, TV3 and other channels. How one would drive traffic into what probably would be a less accessible channel number is another story, but the Oireachtas has the benefit of national communication and the fact that people are interested to some degree in what it has to say. The Oireachtas has the content. It is my recommendation to the committee that it should seriously investigate the possibility of putting its deliberations directly onto television on digital, cable and satellite.
I made the suggestion some time ago and it was picked up by a newspaper that jumped on the bandwagon and asked an advertising agency whether it would raise advertising. I said that was not the point. It is not about raising advertising; it is about providing a public service. There has to be a meeting of minds on a body such as this. Possibly a part of the RTE licence fee could be stripped away to make this happen. When one looks at an organisation such as RTE that has its cake and can eat it, which is funded by the hard-pressed citizens of this country to the tune of €160 per household per annum, and is allowed to take as much advertising revenue as it wants, it is only in difficult times such as these that one can see the insecurity of the model when the advertising falls away.
The committee has the opportunity to make a recommendation to consider the feasibility of setting up its own channel. It could be done extremely easily. I am speaking about something which complements, not replaces, what is already being done on the Internet and programmes such as "Oireachtas Report" or the coverage of stations such as TG4 or TV3. It is about having the means to disseminate what I consider to be valuable information on a four to five day a week basis and to get the deliberations of the Dáil, Seanad and committees out there, and to do it within an affordable scale at which the public would not baulk because they would see it as another potential waste of taxpayers' funds. I recommend that the committee should do this, if it could be done within the context of existing budgets and what is already available, namely, the valuable content.
