Departmental Expenditure

Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 13 May 2020

Wednesday, 13 May 2020

Ceisteanna (1219)

Catherine Murphy

Ceist:

1219. Deputy Catherine Murphy asked the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government the amount expended on access to online and hard copy media publications in each of the years 2017 to 2019 and to date in 2020; the breakdown of online and hard copy subscriptions including the publications that his Department subscribes to; if consideration has been given to using a banded set of IP addresses for online subscriptions rather than individual accounts; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [4010/20]

Freagraí scríofa

Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government

As the provision of all hard-copy newspapers to my Department is operated as a single service with one invoice covering all titles, a breakdown by publication is not possible. The total spent on all media subscriptions is as follows:-

		2017	2018	2019	2020
1	Newspapers	€6,173	€8,009	€8,682	€2,080
2	Online Newspaper Subscriptions	€313	€508	€683	€448
3	Media Monitoring Service	€6,698	€6,504	€6,673	€4,705

A breakdown of payments relating to online newspaper subscriptions is as follows:

		2017	2018	2019	2020
1	The Irish Times	€144	€144	€144	€60
2	Sunday Business Post	€169	€169	€169	€149
3	The Times (UK)	-	€195	€260	€87
4	Financial Times	-	-	€110	€110
5	The Irish Independent	-	-	-	€42

To date, my Department has not considered using a banded width of IP addresses for online subscriptions as my Department only has one subscription to the newspapers listed above for use by its Press Office.