I wish to raise the topic of local radio stations around the country. It has been brought up here previously. I cannot express the importance of having a radio station like LMFM in our community enough. The staff call themselves the voice of the north-east. They reach up to 300,000 people on a daily basis. What has happened with local radio stations over the past month is that we have learnt that there are going to be lots of job losses and directors of different stations, like LMFM, will not be there in the future. I fear for how we will get local news and hear about community events if this is what happening to local radio stations.

LMFM provides amazing GAA coverage, strong local journalism and champions local communities. It gives the north-east its own voice. It supports local businesses. I wish to give a shout-out to the Adrian Kennedy show with Katie and the lunch time show with Gerry and Louise. My own mam and dad, who are not with us anymore, had LMFM on every morning without fail.

That is where they got a lot of their local news. It is also where they got the death notices, which are really important to people who cannot access them somewhere else. My mam and dad never would have been able to use smartphones and there are still so many people who cannot use them. We are expected now to be an ultra-modern IT country that can access everything online, and we cannot. It is the same as Senator Kennelly talking about sport being online and big GAA matches. People just want to be able to watch it regularly on their TVs. They want to be able to listen to local news regularly on their radios and not always have to tune into something on a smartphone or a smart device. This needs a bigger conversation. The last thing we need to see is local, good radio stations like LMFM being threatened into not being able to survive in the future and cutting jobs because of the pressures they are under due to costs and different people getting news in different ways. Just as we support our local newspapers, we need to support our local radio stations as well, particularly LMFM.