 Good evening. You're very welcome to our Young Professionals Network webinar on prices in the future of EU reporting in Ireland. My name is Derek Moriarty. I'm a researcher and press officer at the Institute on how to share our YPN group. We're delighted this evening to be joined by Rila McCormack, who is assistant editor with the Irish Times. Just a brief note on our celebrations for our 30th anniversary, which we'll be doing throughout the month of May. You might have seen some of our communications already by email and on social media. Some of the speakers we have include Commissioner Ryan McGinnis, who will actually be speaking to us this Friday. Larry Somers is going to be speaking to us next week, Simon Coveney. We're going to have the teacher of me on that. They have a really big speech on Ireland and Europe. Also, we're going to have Bertie Herne and Tony Blair for an in-conversation session on Anglo-Irish relations. Then towards the end of the month, we're going to have former President Mary Robinson address climate justice. All the events that we're doing in May are completely free to attend, so do keep an eye on iaiea.com forward slash events for more information on all of that. Just on tonight's topic, obviously Brexit and the future of EU reporting in Ireland and its impact, I suppose at the IAEA, since 2015, since even 2014, Brexit is an issue that we've covered from all angles. But the impact that Brexit is going to have on how Irish people consume European affairs and there is something we haven't really gotten to in great detail. Now that Brexit has sort of become a reality, it's something that's really going to hit us and I think we need to get to grips with that issue. I'll shortly hand over to Ruan who's going to address that very topic tonight. I think he's going to begin with a bigger, broader focus on how the European citizens that consume EU news, it's a bit distorted because a lot of the news we get now comes from outside of the EU. You wrote a very interesting column recently on how that's particularly acute in the Irish sense and in the Irish case because of how much British media we actually consume here. Before I introduce Ruan formally, just let me briefly flag some of the housekeeping issues for our zooms. I'm sure you're all well accustomed to them by now. We do want to hear from you throughout the discussion and you can get involved in the Q&A session by using Zoom's Q&A function. And also if you're into this sort of thing on Twitter, you can get engaged as well using the handle, ask IIEA and the hashtag YPN, hashtag IIEA party. I'll just briefly introduce Ruan now before handing the floor over. He's assistant editor at the Irish Times. As I mentioned, he's held opposition since 2017 prior to taking on that role. He was a legal affairs correspondent and Paris correspondent with the paper. In over 12 years at the Irish Times, he's reported from more than 40 countries. And in his first book, the Supreme Court was widely acclaimed and was published by Penguin in 2016. Ruan, thanks once again for making the time this evening to join us. I know you've spoken to the YPN a couple of times over the years and we really do appreciate it. The floor is yours. Thanks, Tara. And thanks for the invitation. I'll keep these introductory remarks brief and off and we can then leave a bit of time for Q&A afterwards. I guess the issue I'm going to highlight is one that's not new but has, I think, become more apparent and certainly more problematic since the UK left the European Union. So it's something I have a personal or at least professional interest in. In that, I guess now I work for one of the few English language media organizations operating in the EU that spends a lot of time and resources on these questions on how to cover the European Union for our readership, for our audience. So it's something we think a lot about. So what's the issue? The issue is that the market for news about the EU is dominated by players who are now outside the Union. Why is that a problem? Because I think it skews how the European Union sees itself or rather how certain EU states see it and I come back to that distinction. But I think it also distorts how the rest of the world sees the European Union as well. When I say the markets dominated by non-EU players, I'm thinking of their global reach. So if you look at the three standard measures of reach in this industry, so traffic, subscriptions, social media numbers, the biggest players in that field by a long shot are English language outlets. And that's not to say that you don't have a lot of French and German and Italian media organizations that aren't vastly influential, of course you do. But their influence, I guess, is circumscribed by language. So I'm thinking of publishers like the FT in New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and so on. And I'd argue that these organizations, brilliant as they are, I'm a big fan of all of them, but that these organizations have a disproportionate role in shaping public opinion, public understandings of the European Union. And as I say, that was always there, but Brexit has made it more apparent and possibly more awkward for the European Union. I wrote a column about this recently and I got a response, a blog post actually, a really considered blog post by Joshua Benton of the Neiman Institute at Harvard. And he studies these questions and is very thoughtful about them. And he put it very well. I thought he said, I quote, what if the distant news outlets covering the United States weren't cloistered in DC or New York? What if they were all, I don't know, in Iceland or Costa Rica or Morocco or Japan? Or what if they were all in a country that used to be part of the United States, but which had recently seceded from the Union and made a big scene of it on the way out? How do you think we'd feel about that? End quote. I should enter a couple of caveats here. I'm not saying that the standard of EU coverage from big English-language media, whether in the UK or the US, is poor, far from it. I think these outlets are filled with really skilled, professional, well-informed journalists who are doing great work, who I read every day. And nor am I claiming that, say, the New York Times sets the terms of reference on European debate in France, for example. Plainly, it's not that straightforward. But what does happen, I think, is that as a result of those outlets' wide reach and influence in big media markets across the world, their stories get picked up, they get followed up, they get amplified, they get translated, which is really important. So when Emmanuel Macron wants to speak to the people of Europe, he does one of two things. He sends a sort of a syndicated opinion piece to media organisations around the European Union. He's done it with us on several occasions. Or he does an interview with DFT. And you've seen a couple of examples of this recently, because he knows that if he says something half interesting and it appears in the DFT, it'll get picked up. And the same is true of Bloomberg and Rogers and several others as well. And while you get a lot of really good journalists covering EU affairs in these outlets, there's a sort of a structural issue at play, which is that while the reporter writes the story, the story is commissioned by, it's dressed up by, the angle is chosen by, news desks that are not based in the European Union, that are not based in Brussels for the most part. They're in London, they're in New York, they might be in Tokyo, wherever. And so these important commissioning decisions, these important framing decisions, are made by editors who are not plugged in in the same way the reporters are. They are concerned primarily with their principal or the largest share of their audience, which is going to be in the US or the UK or wherever else. And so the frame of reference is different. The questions you ask of a story in those circumstances are different. Now, I'd argue that this situation is at the root of a certain type of misinformation about the EU. So I'm not talking about the willful deceit of certain tabloids who sort of set out to mislead. I'm talking about a sort of a different form of misinformation, which is rooted, I think, in misunderstanding. I chose three examples when I wrote the column recently under this heading. And I'll just read them out of single statements. The first example is the idea that France wants EU corporate tax harmonisation because its president has it in for Ireland. The second example I chose was that Germany's car industry will eventually force Angela Merkel to give London a good Brexit deal. And the third one was that the EU wants to block all vaccine exports to the UK. Now, all of these three claims are false, yet they're accepted or were accepted as facts in many outlets by many commentators for a long time and still are in many cases. They're particularly prevalent in the English language media. And they are, I'm sure, still believed by very many people in spite of them being false. So clearly linguistic obstacles are important here. This type of information flourishes in places where people don't speak a lot of languages, don't have access to other sources of information. And I'll come back to the question of language and translation in a second. I mentioned the dominance of British and American players in particular and how that, I think, distorts the global view of the European Union, so the external view of the European Union. Wolfgang Blau, he's a former senior executive at Continent Asked International, the big publishing house. He's written some really interesting stuff on this very topic. And he argues that UK-US dominance in news is one of the reasons global coverage of the EU so often frames the European Union as a remote economic zone with a firmly economic personality and one that's perpetually on the brink of collapse. So in other words, it's a sort of a simplified external view of what's going on in the European Union and that's the frame through which a lot of this coverage is channeled. So what can be done about all of this? Well, one solution is for us all to learn a couple of languages, I guess, so that we can vary our consumption and read different sources on different topics. But obviously that's not going to happen or it's not going to happen very quickly, at least. Another way to mitigate the effect is to translate. We all know that Google Translate is really useful, but we also know that machine translation still has a long way to go and it's not yet a standard we would need for this to be intuitive and available to us in a sort of a systematic way. So while we're waiting for it, I think there's a lot that media outlets themselves can do. For example, at the Irish Times we have some really good relationships with small startups who specialize in translation, they specialize in identifying really good journalism wherever in the European Union it's produced, translating it, dressing it up for international circulation, making it available to us and to others. Some of what we pay for, some of what we get for free, but it's been a really useful service to us when we've been covering pan-European topics. We used it a lot at the time of the last European elections where we published a good few opinion pieces from writers in different countries who were looking at what the election campaign issues were in their countries. In addition to that, you have a lot of other legacy media outlets like Le Monde and El País who publish English language sections periodically. So it's a very conscious effort to broaden the reach of their journalism by having it translated and made available in English online. Then you have broadcast outlets like Euronews that receive significant European Commission funding and do a really good job. You have a lot of other sort of transnational media collaborations that are funded by the European Union. And then there's a slightly different category which is media initiatives or projects or businesses that are aimed at the Brussels bubble. So I'm thinking of really good organizations like Politico Europe or the New European, and what they're doing very well is targeting what is a relatively homogenous or at least coherent audience. In the case of the Brussels, the cosmopolitan circles in Brussels, English speaking for the most part as well. I should point out that one of the obvious reasons that more hasn't been done here is that there are sort of commercial obstacles to targeting a European audience as such. So one is obviously language but the other is that there is no pan-European ad market and it's notoriously difficult to build a subscription base in a market where you're not that familiar or you're not familiar with the audience and the audience isn't that familiar with you. So there are some big obstacles. So what you can take from what I just said is that I have much more faith in our ability to diagnose the problem than in our ability to solve it. What I might actually do is just maybe leave it there and leave it to the audience to sort of identify what they're interested in and what we might come back at. So maybe we'll leave it there there and I'll come back in a minute. Yeah, that's perfect. Everyone look, Thierry, thanks very much for the initial couple remarks. And as everyone mentioned, audience members watching me in, please feel free to get involved. You can submit your questions using the Q&A function and we'll get to them as well. I'm just going to kick off myself now with one or two questions. Rowan, you mentioned the Harvard academic who sort of did a response piece to your column around your diagnosis of this problem. What other sort of reactions have you received? I think Twitter can be an unforgiving place. Was there any people who had some critiques or analysis of your piece? Was there any holes that were pointed out? And if there were, how would you address them? Yes, it won't surprise you to hear that there were some critiques on Twitter. They were all really good and two of the points struck me in particular. One was that this is more of an Irish problem than I had and I had acknowledged in the piece that Ireland, for obvious reasons, is really heavily exposed to the media market, the English language media market. And so we're much more susceptible to the distortions that I'm describing in the article and again here today. And I think that is valid. I think that's true, no question. Clearly Ireland is more exposed to the media market, the English language market. It's much more aware of what's being said in the UK and the US around these questions. So that's self-evident. However, I would say that I described how something that appears in an English language media outlet that has a vast global reach will travel faster around the world. It'll be followed up, it'll be picked up by other media organisations, it'll be translated. I think that has an effect in countries where they don't speak English. So I've spent years living in France, six or seven years over the last 15, 20 years living in France and I could see firsthand how something that appeared in the New York Times or the FT had a way of working its way back into the French media. Same thing happens in Germany. Of course, if you're in a large country like France or Germany, they're big enough to create their own reality in a way that Ireland is not. So there is that. But I think to some degree or another, this is a factor everywhere in the European Union. The other criticism I got on Twitter was the argument that, well, what are you doing about it? What's the Irish Times doing about this? That's absolutely valid as well. It's not as though we're a disinterested observer here. What we're doing is, I've mentioned some of the relationships we built up and we spent a lot of time working on those, looking for potential partners around the continent. I was just speaking to somebody from a French newspaper about a month ago about another relationship along those lines. We invest pretty heavily in our European coverage. We've got correspondence around the continent in key capitals and we've got a lot of freelance journalists who work with us a lot in places where we don't have staff. We give it a lot of space and print. We've run a lot of stories online every day from around Europe. So I guess that's what we're doing. There's always more that we can be doing. It's something that we've been giving a lot of thought to since Brexit, not since Brexit occurred, but since the Brexit referendum because we know that we have a not insignificant audience in the UK who are interested in our perspective on Ireland, the UK and Europe. We know also that we have a significant enough audience around the European Union who we think are logging on and reading our journalism for much the same reason. So it has prompted us over the last couple of years to think quite hard about how we cater to that European audience. You mentioned there, Rowan, sort of the question posed to you, affiliate with yours times in terms of what are you doing about it? I suppose one national measure that the government here has taken is to establish the Future of Media Commission. They're in the process of running a series of webinars and they're going to publish a series of recommendations and so on. Coming out of that, I mean, how do you see that shaping up and sort of impacting this problem you've diagnosed? I mean, is there anything you would like to see that commission do or to assist the broader Irish media to cover Europe better or any particular thoughts on that? I think it's really good that the commission was set up. The Irish Times was one of many organizations and individuals that submitted some ideas to it and we've published those suggestions. We ran a story of our own on our proposals. I'm also involved on a member of the press council, so I've been watching it with that hat on as well. I've been tuning in to some of their public consultation events. I really wish them well and hope they make the best of it. I think I don't envy them because they've got a really, really broad remit and these questions are not simple. They're not straightforward and so they've a lot to get through and so they'll be doing really well to marshal all that information and to come up with proposals in the amount of time they have. A lot of these questions around the future of the media, how to fund media in the digital age are really well rehearsed and I won't waste too much of your time going into it here, but the kernel of the issue is how you make this economic or how you create a climate in which media organizations can make this economically viable, but you know talking about these questions about European coverage and foreign coverage goes to the heart of those debates because this is the definition of public, to my mind it's the definition of public service journalism and I think people often confuse public service journalism with journalism that doesn't pay its way. That's not automatic. The connection isn't automatic. We have a really significant, highly engaged audience of readers and viewers now and listeners who are interested in our European coverage, who are interested in our world coverage. So it's not simply that the media needs money where it's not going to make that money itself, but it's a question of how you create a climate in which media organizations come up with a sort of a prioritization system that is economic. That might not be all that clear, but certainly put it this way. These questions that we're discussing here, I think at the heart of the deliberations, the sort of questions that are going to be delivered to the future of the media question, I really hope they do well. Yeah, look, there's a couple of questions coming in now, so I'll kick off with a few of them. Owen Flaherty asks, first of all, he says thanks for your talk, and you've done a very insightful, and do you think there'd be much, you touched on this a little bit, but I suppose you could tease out a little bit more. Do you think there'd be much appetite for pan-EU news? He says surely there's an incentive for the EU and big German, French publicers to try to write down those barriers to make it easier for news to be sold across borders, across member states. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think there is an appetite for it. The question is who provides it and how do you pay for it, I guess. And also, there's a lot of practical questions like what language and what's your distribution channel and all this. I mentioned that there are a couple of media organizations that are funded significantly or subsidized by the European Union, and a lot of them do really good work, but I'm not sure that that's the answer for everyone. I think there has to be a space for independent journalism that isn't funded by the European Union or by any state. So really, it's a question for those media outlets themselves as to whether they can build up a business model, whether around advertising or subscriptions or both, that can make it pay. So I'm convinced that there's an audience. I don't know how big the audience is, and I don't yet know how you would construct a business model around it. But I know that a lot of media organizations in Europe and around the world have been giving this a lot of thought. I mentioned Wolfgang Blau. He's been doing a really interesting work on that very question. So yes, I think there's an audience. I'm not sure that having it funded by the European Union or by any state is the answer. So again, I come back to the question of creating a climate in which media organizations can operate, and that climate touches everything from defamation to tax systems and everything else. A lot of the questions that I know are being considered by the media commission actually. Great, yeah. Thanks very much for your response, there. There's a group of questions coming in now. David, Gary asks, the EU in crisis narrative tends to slip into news. As many of you came base journalists, you mentioned the UK in particular, have never spent time in the continent. And he says, even Tony Connelly himself, he's quoting Tony Connelly, so we will have to, trust him on, I said he never truly understood things like the EU single market until it happened, until he got involved in the weeds in the detail. And he asks, is there a way we can quality check journalism in terms of their knowledge and experience of the EU before they write on this? I wonder what your thoughts are on that? The best quality check is to pay for it or not to pay for it, to consume it or not. That's the most traditional quality control mechanism we have. Let me just for a minute defend UK journalists, because certainly it wasn't my intention to malign them in any way. There are really, really excellent journalists writing in English or broadcasting in English about the European Union. I mentioned some of them. I read them and watch them every day. They're some of the best people in the business. It's certainly not about disparaging English language journalists. And I would also add that some of the media organizations that invest most in European coverage and treat it most seriously are also English language media outlets. So that's worth saying. What I think would be interesting to see is whether we know that for the last 20 years, British media have been in retrenchment mode where it comes to European coverage. A lot of them have cut back on their numbers in Brussels. Some of them have cut back on their bureau across the continent as well. It'll be interesting to see whether and I think actually that that was exposed during the Brexit debates where I mentioned some of those misconceptions about Brexit and about the internal dynamics of the European Union. And I think some of that at least was attributable to cuts in staff, journalism jobs on the continent. You saw very direct results of that. So it'll be interesting to see whether some of those media outlets will cut back further, whether they will lose interest in covering the European Union at all. I mean it's not as if the European Union would become irrelevant to British interests far from it. But we don't yet know what sort of effect it'll have on all those media outlets. There are clearly some that will not cut back because they have global ambitions. They have European ambitions. And if anything, I think they will see logic in scaling up. But I think that's one of the interesting questions on the next couple of years. To what extent does the British media more generally begin to cut back? Yeah, just a couple of questions here on sort of the regulations and media ownership rules that are in place at the moment. And what effect do you think those have on media outputs and media quality in Europe? And then the specific question then on state aid rules. Would you think that state aid rules could be relaxed and that this might sort of increase pan-European media? Or does this risk denigrating independence of the media? This is what the question asked from Philip Crow. I think as I said, I think independence is really important. I think as a general principle, diversity of ownership is a good thing. You'll notice in a lot of the examples I gave of media organizations that covered European Union well, there's a pretty wide spectrum of ownership. Among them are media outlets that are owned by, in effect, single individuals or single families. There are media organizations like ourselves that are owned by charitable trusts, that are organizations that are not for profit. There are organizations that are owned by the conglomerates. I think the key point is diversity, that you want to create an environment in which it's viable for different types of organizations to operate and to invest in coverage. It's probably one of the, I mean, I don't have any particular insight into the work of the media commission, but I would imagine that one of the critical questions that they'll be considering and weighing up and where there will be different views is around the whole question of how the state funds journalism or how the state supports journalism. This is at the heart of these debates. Some of us are very uncomfortable with the idea of any direct funding. I know that in France they have a much more relaxed attitude to that because the state has been funding journalism in France in one way or another since the revolution. Some of it is indirect through the tax system. Journalists pay a lower rate of tax. There are all sorts of tax breaks available to media organizations. You also have a lot of direct funding of media organizations and they have different sort of formula to weigh up the funding available to every organization and pull it out. You'll find that there are differing national attitudes that reflect the historical experience in each country. What I think just as that's going to be one of the naughtiest questions before the future of media commission here in Ireland, it's going to be one of the questions that is going to weigh down any debates about pan-European media and the involvement of the European Commission in any such interest. Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for your response. There are a good few questions here now, just one from a colleague of mine at the Institute, Hannah DC. She again thanks if you're remarks and says really insightful. Is it time for national media outlets, not necessarily Irish, but you know national media outlets across Europe to move away from the Brussels correspondent model and mainstream their EU coverage across the newsrooms? Could this help expand the understanding of coverage of EU policy and decision-making processes in Europe? Any thoughts on that? That's a really interesting question. I think there is a really important role and there will continue to be a really important role for journalists who are based in Brussels writing about the European Union because in the same way that it serves us really well to have political correspondence covering Irish politics, the same is true of Brussels coverage. You really do need people sitting in the building, visiting the building talking to the principal actors, attending press conferences, attending briefings, looking out for stories. There's nothing like having somebody in the building talking to the people involved. There's no substitute for that. But in the same way that our political coverage is not the exclusive preserve of our political correspondence, we have a whole lot of specialist correspondents writing about everything from the environment to education and health and everything else who are writing about political issues every day. They have relationships with contacts throughout the political system as well as in the policy area and in their area of focus as well. In the same way that we don't define politics as what goes on in Leicester House only, we don't define, I hope we don't, it doesn't come across as us defining the European Union as what happens in Brussels only. So our correspondent in Berlin, Derek Scali, our correspondent in Paris, Lara Marlow, our correspondent in London at Anastanton, they write about EU issues all the time but they're writing about them from Paris, Berlin and London. The same is true of journalists who write for us from elsewhere in the continent as well. So I would hope that in that way we already are mainstreaming European coverage. If you think of the way we write about economics, if you think about the way we cover the environment, I would argue that we cover them very much with an eye to European policy and European political developments. But I think the argument is very well made and it's worth reminding ourselves of that all the time that the European Union is not something that happens in Brussels, it's something much bigger than that. Yeah, brilliant everyone, thanks so much for your response to that question. Just two questions on social media. One from Stephen Frane who asks, do social media giants have a role or obligation to play when we're talking about this media landscape being skewed in terms of the algorithms behind social media and how they curate the platforms and the feeds that people are consuming? And then there's the follow-up question then on that as well. To what extent is the problem you're describing being modified and changed over time as we consume more and more social media? So two social media related questions there, interested to get your views on that one. Can you repeat the second part of that question? To what extent the problems you're diagnosing in terms of the European coverage taking place primarily from outside of the block, is that being modified or changed over time as a result of social media? What's the question? So I mentioned the global reach of certain outlets. Clearly a big factor in their global reach is their social media reach. That's clearly a factor in the speed with which a lot of these stories make their way around the world. All of these media outlets rely on social media as a distribution channel, really significantly. So clearly they play a very big role. I hadn't thought of blaming social media, maybe I should. I mean, I guess these issues play out on social media when I'm talking say about misinformation. Misinformation travels on social, misinformation about the European Union travels on social in the way that all other types of misinformation travel. So I guess it plays a role in that way. So a lot of these stories, I mentioned the story, for example, this was a really common view over the last few years. This view that Germany would eventually buckle in its negotiating stance towards Brexit because of the internal pressure it would feel from its domestic car industry. And this point was made again and again and again. It wasn't true. And I think to anybody who was following the domestic German debate about these things, it would have been clear that that wasn't true. And Eric Scali, our correspondent, wrote about this at length. A story like that gains legs because it travels and it travels mainly through social media. So clearly there's a role there. I'm not sure that directly the social media giants have a role in fixing the problem. I think ultimately it's a problem for the media organizations themselves to crack. It's a challenge for media organizations themselves to come up with a business model if that's what they want to do for pan-European journalism. And then it's a challenge for states or European state actors to create a climate that's conducive to public service independent journalism. So I'm not sure that answers the question. I guess it's a sort of yes and no. Yeah, well, I think the way you mentioned the fact that the reach of these bigger organizations is amplified by their social media presence, et cetera, that they're interlinked. I think two other questions here, Ruan, specifically on the Irish Times. One question from Amphiz Patrick. She just mentions the podcasts that you have. And I think more and more people are now consuming their news to podcasts. She mentions you have the Inside Politics podcast. You've got the World View. Would you consider possibly adding or do you think there'd be interest in a dedicated EU podcast? I know, depending on what the story is of that week, you could get a bit of EU on World View, you could get a bit of EU on Inside Politics, but would you think there'd be appetite and interest in a dedicated EU podcast? And then the second question, specifically on the Irish Times, comes from Alex Conway. And he references, you're referring to the FT, et cetera. Those your own organization, those the Irish Times have ambitions to become a Europe-wide paper of records, to be more active in that process bubble and consumed by that bubble and across the Europe, like the FT, for example. If so, how would you go about achieving that? So two fairly different questions, but about your own paper at the Irish Times. These are really good questions as well. On the podcasts, this is just a sort of, well, often we have had weeks and months where, in effect, the World View and Politics podcasts have been EU podcasts or at least have been European podcasts. And that's just in the nature of it in that, when the Brexit issue was in the headlines every day, when that topic was being discussed everywhere. There were days, I know, when we were publishing dozens of stories every day about Brexit. And when the story was that hot, we were running podcasts almost every day, whether it was the World View podcast, Inside Politics or the Business podcast, where Brexit figured and where European issues figured. My hunch is that, of course, if you set up a European podcast, just as if you set up an EU newsletter or an EU TV show, you would get a certain audience. You would get an audience of hyper-engaged professionals in particular who have a stake and a professional, maybe also personal interest in following that stuff released closely. But it wouldn't be huge. And I think what people are drawn to is less the idea of EU coverage than coverage of specific issues that might or might not be about the EU. But I'm thinking, for example, of environmental questions, questions to do with travel, questions to do with all sorts of policy areas where the EU is at the heart of those issues. But I think you would do it much more successfully if you and you would find a bigger audience if you were to focus on individual issues than if you were to say this is an EU, a teamed podcast or regular feature. As I say, you would get a certain audience for it, but it wouldn't necessarily be that big, certainly in a media market the size of Ireland. Now, that's connected to the second part of your question, which is whether the Irish Times has ambitions to do some of this itself. There are very real constraints and obstacles in the way for any media organisation that wants to broaden its reach in that way. I mentioned that there's no pan-European ad market. I mentioned that it's very difficult to build up a subscription base from scratch in a market where you are not familiar with the market, where the market isn't familiar with you, where the audience isn't necessarily familiar with you. But what I would say is that we've certainly noticed in the last few years that there is an audience for our journalism around Europe. There's a big audience for our journalism in the UK. I noticed a lot in our coverage of the Scottish independence referendum a few years ago, where a lot of people in Scotland and in the UK more generally were coming to us because we didn't have skin in the game in a way, and we were trying to come at it in a fair and balanced or at least neutral way, I guess, compared to some of the media organisations in the UK where they wore their politics on their sleeves much more. And we found it again over the course of the Brexit debates over those few years that we were finding a big audience in the UK. I have no doubt that a huge share of that audience was disappointed remainers who were looking for media outlets that they felt shared their view. But I think a lot of it was people coming to us, and I'm sure we weren't the only Irish media organisation. I know Ortig got this as well because their coverage was really high quality, but people coming to them and to us because we were coming at it from a, we were at a remove from the story, I guess. So clearly, there's a certain potential there. But as I say, there are obstacles, there are the two I mentioned, and there's of course the language obstacle as well. Thanks very much for the question here. Again, going back to something we've touched upon a little bit and you've given a bit of detail on France in particular. It goes back to the funding issue again. Comes from Ross with Patrick again. He thanks you for your interesting insights. Given the nature of the existing corporate media system, he says, which prioritises profit over adversarial journalism, have you come across alternative public media systems in Europe or around the world which might serve as a more democratic alternative to the current corporate model? Any references to the corporate model being particularly prevalent in the United States and indeed in Europe? Any thoughts on that? I noticed some really interesting stuff happening in the US, where you've got connections between philanthropic or charitable organisations and media outlets. You've got a couple of public service oriented media startups in the US that have managed really successfully to tap into that philanthropic world, which is much bigger and much better developed in the US than it is in Europe and they're doing really interesting public service journalism as a result. You also have, again, you see a lot more of this in the US than in the EU. A lot of mainstream or legacy, I don't know what the word is I'd use, legacy media organisations that undertake projects with philanthropic or charitable funding. You'll come up with a project, a public service oriented project that you feel you can't fund through more traditional means and you will approach a charitable organisation or a philanthropic group and say, do you want to collaborate with us on this? There's some really interesting stuff that's come out of that. The alternative model, of course, is to be non-profit and I say it in all modesty that there are certain organisations that I don't think do chase adversary journalism over standards and over high quality because they're not under the same commercial pressures that others are. There is that, but I think in an ideal scenario you would have a competitive environment in which media organisations set up in different ways would be able to compete because that would lift the quality more generally, I think, but clearly media ownership concentration, the corporate dominance of the media sector, of course, these are questions I would play into all of this, but what I'd really like to see is a more a better developed European philanthropic charitable structure around media organisations in the way you do already have in the US. Thanks for that, Ruan. I suppose just a question on my own, slightly moving out of the media realm, but it's something you've referenced throughout your remarks tonight, both Miki and I, and then the initial remarks. It's the issue of language as an Ireland and it's sort of a perennial issue that we haven't really gotten the grips to. I, myself, lived in Barcelona for a year, did Lamingster Spanish and can't speak a word of it, so I think there's a lot of people like us who have been around languages, have studied them, but they're just something to stick. I mean, what do you think that is? Do you think it's laziness in that part, that someone somewhere was speaking English and would get away with us, or what do you think the issue is? It's a big question. I've written a fair bit about this over the last few years, and I think it's because it's become much more acute this question since Brexit, in that the whole thrust of official policy towards the EU, since once you leave aside for a minute the Brexit negotiations themselves, the reorientation that has been talked about a lot since the Brexit referendum has been really about developing relationships post-Brexit, building new systems of alliances, retaining Irish influence in a European Union where we've lost this key relationship. And of course languages are central to that, and I know that there's been a lot of strategic work going on in the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Education as well around language learning. You know, we had a story just today about a discussion at cabinet about the problem the state has in the shortage of Irish graduates who are joining the European civil service, joining the European Commission and other institutions. You know, there's been a huge fall-off in the last few years in the number of Irish civil servants working in the EU institutions. There's a big bulge of people in their late 50s and early 60s who are going to be retiring in the next while, and there's just not the flow of people coming through. And there are all sorts of reasons for that. It's a cumbersome application process, you know, there are more opportunities at home now than there would have been 30 or 40 years ago. What I think languages are a big factor, and you know, it's been widely reported that Irish people, Irish applicants often fall down on the language requirements when going for those jobs. I think there's only so much you can do about that in the short term. You know, I think you really need to be thinking about how languages, foreign languages are taught in school, you know, secondary school, but also primary school. I think it would have to be at the heart of the education system in a way that it's not at present. I don't think it's enough to blame people for being lazy. You know, yes, we speak English and a lot of the world speaks English, but I'm not sure that that's enough of an explanation. You know, so it's not an easy question to answer. I think it's going to become much more acute as a problem. Ireland is the only English-speaking country left in the EU, and there's a lot of work that has to be done on maintaining and building these relationships. But as I say, it's not a question that can be solved overnight. It's a real long-term question, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much for your insight on that one. Different question here. We've talked a little bit, I suppose, throughout this discussion this evening about the possible limitations of understanding of the EU within the UK in sections of certain sections of the UK media. But a question here from Rob Enright asks, how well do you think the major EU outlets cover UK politics and they're on the standing of UK society? And, you know, what would you say about that in terms of Brussels understanding, but also more wider across different member states? That's a really interesting question, I think. So I can't tell you about, you know, European coverage country by country of the UK. You know, I know Ireland, I know France. My sense of it is that, I know them and that I read their media every day, my sense of it would be that, you know, taking France for it as an example, the coverage is, the coverage varies pretty wildly, you know. So you've got a couple of media organisations that invest pretty heavily in the coverage of the UK, have correspondence there. In some cases, have several correspondence or at least stringers reporting from the UK. And so inevitably, their coverage is better as a result of that. There really is no substitute for having people on the ground and living in a place to improve your coverage. And then there are outlets that rely almost exclusively on wire copy or on material that's written about the UK from France. And, you know, there are organisations that have smaller budgets or are less sort of less oriented towards the rest of the world. So I think, you know, it's a difficult question to answer. I think there's a lot of high quality reporting going on about what's happening in the UK. There's a lot of low quality reporting about events in the UK. You know, we're in an unusual position because a lot of our coverage of the UK comes directly from there. And that obviously shapes the coverage of our domestic media outlets as well. But yeah, a bit of a cop out my answer, but I think there's a lot of good and a lot of bad. And the question here from Alex again on the UK media, notwithstanding the general trend of UK publications reducing their presence possibly in the EU and editorial stance, how do you think Brighton might affect the character of how the UK outlets cover the EU? You're already touching this a little bit given the fact that the UK is going to continue to obviously have a close relationship with the EU. It's in their interest to know what's going on. But how do you think Brighton specifically might impact the character of how they cover us? When we're covering the European Union, it's a domestic story, right? You know, so very often we're covering EU legislation, we're covering, you know, a decision taken by a European, by the court just to say that has very direct implications for the state and for its citizens. We cover a whole lot of European policy in that same way. So we're covering European affairs as a domestic issue. In the UK, that's not quite true anymore. Clearly, it's true indirectly that what happens in the European Union will continue to have a pretty major effect on the UK and not just in obvious areas like trade and economics. But I think when that ceases to be a domestic issue in that very direct way, media coverage is bound to change as a result. Now, of course, there were a lot of UK media organizations that didn't give the UK much thought, sorry, didn't give the EU much thought to begin with, didn't give it much space, didn't give it much airtime. So there's not much that will change there. But there were other media organizations that did. And I think what will be interesting to see is what effect Brexit has on and at that sort of higher end of the British media market, to what extent today has come to pressures, economic pressures to reduce their footprint on the continent. I think the force that will mitigate that effect in a way is the potential for European expansion for these organizations. So the Guardian, for example, clearly has European ambitions in the same way that has global ambitions. It knows that there's a massive market of readers on its doorstep. And I think it'll continue to cater to that audience. But there are other media organizations that aren't oriented towards the EU in quite the same way. So I think it'll be really interesting to see. It's bound to have some sort of an effect, but it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few years. Treasure Room, we're just coming towards the end now of the hour. I don't know if anyone else wants to throw in one or two more questions before we finish up. And we're all just one more question of my own. You mentioned in your column, and indeed you mentioned this evening as well, about those misconceptions or those myths, you know, the Francis out to get Ireland on corporate tax and the German car manufacturing industries, the understepping, etc. And it does feel from consuming some of the Irish media around the economics issues that the corporate tax one is the one that looms that this is some sort of, you know, European effort to get Ireland. I mean, what are your thoughts on how that is portrayed in the Irish media and how it's interpreted here? I mean, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of powerful influential people who just really don't like how Ireland uses its tax rate in the way that it does to attract multinationals to, as they say, to undercut the European competition. I'm not saying that that's not a factor, but what I was saying and, you know, identifying that as a source of a misconception about the European Union was that if you look in particular at the French debate about Ireland's corporate tax rate, it's much more complex than a French president feeling aggrieved about Ireland's 12.5 percent rate versus France official rate of 30 something percent, even though it's effective rate is very much lower. And in the case of some very big French national champions, it's close to zero. But, you know, it's just the point is simply that it's a much more complex debate than that simplification would allow. You know, so I was fairly convinced when I was Paris correspondent and covering these things every day that there was nothing Nicolas Sarkozy wanted more when it came to tax than to increase, than to lower France's rate. But for domestic political reasons, he was unable to do that. And so the pressure on Ireland to increase its rate was an attempt to meet somewhere in the middle to achieve a domestic policy goal that couldn't be achieved using domestic levers because the domestic pressure he was under, right? So it's really just that point. It's the point that a lot of these debates are much more complex than that sort of reductionism would allow. And it's not to say that there isn't a kernel of truth to some of those points, but just that there's more to it very often. And there's more to it in a way that you can only really understand if you're in the country, if you're reading its media every day, or if you're served by good journalists who are able to explain it to you. Ruan, two audience members have jumped in with their last orders for the question. So I'm just going to put them at you now and answer them as concise as you can and we'll finish up at eight. Anna Nichols asks, regarding aside from the political and social elements associated with the EU, how's the technical nature of most EU policy areas affect the quality of reporting, particularly on legislative changes, directives, etc. Is it just too technical for mass consumption? That's one question. And then a final question refers to the Irish Times again, you've got correspondence in France, Germany, Brussels, Irish readers can read the media in French, German, perhaps Italian, even Spanish. But with issues becoming much more complex and pressing in other European states like Poland, with less familiar languages, where the Irish media has no correspondence, is this a source of concern for you with the Irish Times and how do you think this could be covered? So two different questions to finish on. Appreciate your response about them and then we'll wrap up. Okay, thanks for the questions. I mean, certainly the technical nature of, the technical and protracted nature of EU decision making and lawmaking poses a challenge in that very often, thinking in very practical terms here, you'll have a visa legislation or you'll have a legislative process that has so many stages that it'll become almost impossible to report on each one. And to report on each one in a way that explains to the leader exactly what stage it's at and what's gone on before and what's likely to come. It's just not feasible in the sort of constraints you're working with day to day. So what you try to do is you try to come up with a way of serving your audience, telling them what's happening without doing any, without overly reducing or simplifying the process. So you will tend to cover a story when it reaches an important stage in the legislative process. Inevitably, you will give more coverage to stories that you feel will resonate more with your audience that'll have a direct effect on people living in Ireland. But no question, the drawn out process of the European lawmaking makes it more difficult to cover day to day. The second part of the question was about our times coverage of other EU capitals. The point is well made. In an ideal world, we would, not unlike the Department of Fair and Affairs, we would have a correspondent in every EU capital. But it's just not possible for us to do that. So what we do is we, you know, so Derek Scali does a lot of work in Poland, for example. Naomi O'Leary, based in Brussels, travels, travels, which doesn't travel a great deal during the pandemic before and after. I hope she'll get a lot more opportunities to travel around the continent as well. We work, we work with a lot of freelance journalists and stringers in places where we're not served by staff members. And we also very consciously when we're building up the sort of partnership I described to you with those startups that specialise in translation and content sharing, we ask them for, you know, we say we're particularly interested in coverage of certain countries. I'm thinking of Poland and Hungary actually in particular, where we've had a big interest in the last few years, but don't have staff members. So we tell them we're interested in those countries and see what they've got for us. But, you know, undoubtedly not having people in all of these places makes it more difficult for us to cover them. No question. Lent, Ruann, look, thanks very much again for your time this evening for your initial presentation. And I think we've gotten through a huge amount of the questions. I think it's, you know, it's testament to the interest in this area that there was so much engagement. So again, thanks for your time and for your frank openness in the Q&A. So we'll leave it there. And thanks very much again. I look forward to having you again at some point in the future, maybe in person. Right. Thanks, Tara. Cheers, everyone. Bye-bye.