Mr. David Kavanagh:

Artists everywhere in the world are badly paid. It seems to go with the territory. We believe that they are paid significantly worse in Ireland because of inadequacies in our legislative and policy structures. This undermines the prospects for growth in the creative industries in Ireland. Earning an income from what one creates as an artist is not simply a matter of signing a contract and being paid a sum of money. It is primarily a matter of the copyright that one creates. Just as research and development in entrepreneurial companies create trademarks and patents, by exactly the same principle, artists create copyright. It is the use of that copyright throughout the life of that work that earns them an income. In Ireland, copyright is not managed by the Department with responsibility for the arts but by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.

As a result, it has been the long-standing practice that European Union legislation - which would benefit artists by giving them payments for the use of their copyright - has been implemented in Ireland by statutory instrument rather than through legislation in the Houses of the Oireachtas. We believe that the result has been to significantly impoverish Irish artists. Based on European Union calculations, we believe that most artists, although it varies from one sector to another, could increase their earnings by at least 20% if they had access to the kinds of benefit that would result from the full application of European Union directives in the area of copyright, which have been inadequately implemented in Ireland by statutory instrument. We call on the Minister, hopefully encouraged by this committee, to address those eight statutory instruments and examine whether it would be possible to bring them all up to the best European Union standard. The incomes of artists would improve if we even made that fairly simple non-cost-based legislative change.