Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank SPI for its presentation. Before I ask a number of questions, I wish to say I am very much in favour of the State providing support to film and all the other arts in the sector, and indeed I would welcome a very significant increase in the budgets for them. However, I am not, as I suspect the witnesses know, convinced that the way in which section 481 is structured achieves the ends we want in terms of the provision of quality employment and training, which is the legal requirement of section 481, or the development of companies of scale, which 24 years ago the Indecon report said should be the purpose of section 481. That report strongly criticised the project-by-project nature of the Irish film industry and said section 481 - or section 35, as it was then - was encouraging and perpetuating a project-by-project, short-term film industry which would not result in the development of companies of scale. Furthermore, the EU, in its guidelines on state aid to the audiovisual sector, pointed out that such aid should deliver the consolidation of the industry through the creation of soundly based production undertakings and the development of a permanent pool of human skills and experience.

I put it to Ms Geraghty that none of that is happening. For example, SPI and other supporters of section 481 came before the arts committee a year and a half ago and said there were 17,000 whole-time equivalents in the industry, which sounds good.

Today the figure of 7,000 has been used but there was a counter-point put at that committee from the workers in the industry, who said the figure was actually nearer 2,000 and that very few, if any, of those were secure jobs. On foot of that debate, the Minister asked for an investigation into the matter. A study concluded that in 2016 the Revenue Commissioners estimate the number of employees directly engaged in section 481 productions was 2,158. In other words, SPI and other supporters overstated the level of employment in the film industry deriving from section 481 by 800%. That is pretty significant from a value for money point of view for the public. Ms Geraghty might tell us how many of those are permanent or even secure jobs. One of the things the Indecon report stated way back in 1995 was that what we actually had was a series of micro-companies with a very small number of permanent employees. That continues to be the situation. Almost nobody has any security of employment. There is absolutely nothing to protect workers from wholesale displacement or even blacklisting, which has been alleged by workers in the industry. Riddle me this; given that section 481 says specifically that it is given on the proviso of the provision of quality employment and training, how can it be that when challenged by workers in the Labour Court and the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, SPI's members claim that production companies that apply for and get the relief are not the employers? I do not see how a company can get a relief to provide quality employment and training and simultaneously claim that it does not employ the crew on those films, but hide behind a designated activity company, DAC, which is an accountancy tool, not a company. Although the companies that actually apply are standing companies that exist year after year, such as Element Pictures, Metropolitan Films and so on, they claim to have no responsibility whatsoever for the employees. They claim they are not their employees or trainees. As a result, nobody has any kind of security. In terms of training, can anybody even tell me how many trainees have qualified in the different categories of employment over the past ten years?