I welcome this Bill and the implementation of the European Media Freedom Act into Irish law. It is hugely important. There are a few comments I want to make about the media landscape generally. Some people often give out about media in Ireland but, considering how functional our media are here compared with those in other jurisdictions around the world, even in the European Union, we are incredible lucky to have, broadly speaking, balanced and responsible media. I am struck all the time by the discrepancy between what is often referred to as the mainstream or traditional media - the print media and broadcast media - with what we see online. Much of the stuff on social media platforms, for example, entirely lacks the moderation and editing that comes with the media that we feel we can trust. That is a real problem. The more we can establish that freedom for those media, the better. Others have spoken about investment in public service media. That is also hugely important. We often forget that even if we were to ramp up spending on RTÉ - I am not necessarily proposing that should be the case - that, in comparing the budget that is provided for RTÉ in the size of country we are with the budgets provided to public service broadcasters in other jurisdictions, it simply is not on the same playing pitch. One could not, for example, compare the RTÉ budget to the BBC budget. My understanding is that the daily budget for the BBC exceeds the annual budget for RTÉ. That is not to criticise the amount of funding for RTÉ but, rather, to mark the fact that we are a small country and we do not have the capacity to whole-scale fund public service broadcasting in the same way. Notwithstanding that, RTÉ does a really good job. On the budget that it has, it delivers balanced and effective current affairs coverage, for example. Of course, there could be more and it could be better. A criticism I would make, one which I certainly hear from colleagues who are not Irish but may be living here in Ireland, is that they can see the news here as being a little parochial. In the context of being part of a larger European Union, for example, we could see much better coverage of news from other European countries. I am sometimes surprised by the items that get coverage in a prominent place on the RTÉ news and question how newsworthy they are relative perhaps to the footage that is available or the familiarity that Irish people have with places such as America and Britain, which get disproportionate coverage in media relative, for example, to issues in other European countries. There is a programme on RTÉ radio on Sunday mornings, "World Report", which is singularly excellent. Each episode is a small collection of three or four stories from journalists in parts of the world that we do not hear much about. They give a short report on a big news story in that country. It is invariably something that we have never heard of here and has not found its way into the mainstream media in this country. This is a small opportunity for RTÉ to show that there is a breadth of coverage that we do not generally get. What I would like to see is "World Report" being on every morning or every day on RTÉ radio. We as a society would benefit much more if we got news from those parts of the world but we do not hear it as much as we should. The reality is that Irish media consumers rely much more on the international press, for example, international magazines and international journals, to inform them about many significant world events. We cannot rely on Irish media, not even The Irish Times. The Irish Times provides very good international coverage but there is only so much space in the newspaper and there is, consequently, disproportionate coverage for events that occur in the English-language world, if I can put it that way. This point may not necessarily be particularly relevant to this Bill insofar as it does not address advertising standards, for example, but advertising is bound up with, and part and parcel of, the media landscape. What we often see in Irish media, and this is a criticism particularly of media other than RTÉ, is whole-scale English advertising rebroadcast on Irish television. There is a cultural import of that. What that says to me is that the advertiser itself has decided there is no distinction between the Irish market and the British market, for example, and that is really sad. There is something much more important about that, however. The signal it is sending is one thing but there is also the loss for Irish industry. For example, if you have an advertisement that is made in London with professional people based in London, whether they are PR people, advertising people, media crews, copywriters, artistic directors, etc., and that advertisement is broadcast here, all of those people who could have made that advertisement in Dublin, Galway, Cork or Limerick lose out in the fact that that work has gone elsewhere and that is a shame. One of the real steps forward we have made in this country in the past couple of years is the 20% obligation to have State agencies advertise trí mheán na Gaeilge. It is wonderful to hear advertisements that are entirely based through Irish, on television and on radio, from State agencies promoting different programmes or whatever it might be. It means you hear Irish in a real context every day and that is a really good thing, but I am afraid that it is contradicted sometimes by the fact that the next advertisement is for a washing powder being advertised by a person clearly based in London, who has nothing to do with Ireland and may never have been to Ireland. There is a loss for the Irish media consumer there in the fact that our media are not meeting the obligations that they should in terms of providing a media environment that is for Irish people and of Irish people. I started this by saying that there should be greater international focus but what I am also saying is that it should be tailored for the people in this country, not for markets outside this country. In the context of what this Bill is doing, it is hugely important for us to acknowledge how lucky we are to have a functional, fair and generally unbiased media. It is not to say that there are no commentators I disagree with. Of course, there are. In fact, if there were commentators I never disagreed with, that would be a bigger problem. We are lucky to have that. When we look at things, sometimes we see the problems rather than the good things. I see this insofar as what is happening, for example, in the United States, in the complete inability of certain media there to criticise some of things that are happening and the inability of the European media to criticise some of the things that are happening in the Middle East, and particularly the blinkered approach of certain European media to what Israel is doing in Gaza, for example. We do not have that problem here. Insofar as we can look at our media and say that there is something that we can be really proud of, we have media organisations, print and broadcast, in this country which are not afraid to call out things for that they are, not afraid to say things that are unpopular and not afraid to say things that will not curry favour with the Administration of the day. They do that all the time. Thank God not only that they do, but that they feel confident they can do that. That is what media freedom is all about. We are lucky to have it here, which is not to say that we should be complacent about it or take it for granted. We must recognise that the provision of a fair, open and free media is something that must be striven for eternally. We must constantly work to ensure that it is there. We must constantly work to ensure that journalists feel that they can operate in a free and vociferous way within the media environment. In that regard, it is also worth pointing out that media freedom is also about the freedom of journalists and the protection of journalists from situations where they might feel themselves compromised, and that includes online commentary. I have often seen journalists being pilloried online for taking a particular position on something. In fairness, they are well able to fight their own battles. I would not have any concerns about that. In the context of this legislation and the European Media Freedom Act, however, we must remember that there is a State obligation to ensure there is pile-ons do not occur on social media in respect of people who take unpopular positions. As regards cancel culture, which I absolutely abhor, it is entirely reasonable to disagree with somebody or to be disgusted by what they have to say without stating that they should somehow be cancelled. People must be entitled and allowed to express free opinions, whether they are popular or unpopular, pleasant or unpleasant, within the bounds of incitement to hatred and defamation and all the rest. On the Defamation Act, I am concerned we have attempted to specifically address perceived restrictions that might exist for media in terms of defamation actions. With strategic litigations - SLAPPS - and things of that nature which are covered by that legislation, it is obviously important to suppress the ability of people to use litigation to essentially gag organisations, journalists, people, etc. I sometimes think that we went too far in the case of the Defamation Act insofar as we took steps, for example, to eliminate juries from defamation actions in the High Court which were unnecessary. That step was very much taken to placate media to tell them they will not get awards as bad as they might have been. That could have been done by simply removing the quantum capacity for the jury. In other words, letting the judge rather than the jury decide what the quantum of the award would be. There is a balance to be achieved in respect of, on the one hand, the importance of the freedom and non-restriction of journalism and the media and, on the other hand, the operation of the public good and the right of people to have their good names. As already stated, that is outside the scope of this Bill. The Bill takes a piece of European legislation and transposes it into Irish law. It is very welcome in the way that it does that. It is a good thing. I hope it is something that will form part of all the instruments we will continue to put in place to ensure that we have media freedom and, more than that, a media that is unbiased, fair and, most importantly, is vociferous in saying what it feels it needs to say, where that is justifiable, rather than what it has to say because of political pressure or anything like that. I welcome the Bill and look forward to its passage.

Sentiment score: 0.18