Mr. Stephen Rooke:

If we are going to look at the concept of companies of scale, we have to understand the television and film business. There are three major sections within our industry, namely the animation industry, the factual industry and the drama industry. Companies in those three areas are always on a different scale. The factual industry is where Tile Films comes from. We are a company based in Dún Laoghaire that employs ten people full-time and can employ up to 250 people when we are doing a production. We are of the same scale as the average factual company based in London, New York or L.A. When we are looking at section 481 in terms of companies of scale, we have to look at the individual areas. We have companies of scale here as would be the norm across our industry across the world. An animation company may have 200 or 300 people employed because of the type of work they make. A factual company will never have more than ten to 15 people employed full-time. We are generating projects so we have people in development and finance and people going out selling those concepts to broadcasters around the world.

Drama companies are a different animal because there is more development work taking place on scripts and so on in a drama company. By its nature, a drama company will probably grow to a bigger scale. We have companies of a scale here, such as Metropolitan Films and Element Pictures, that are as big as drama companies in Los Angeles. It is wrong to say that we are not building companies to scale here. I think every producer who works in this business is keen to build as big a company as possible. In reality, companies do not get beyond a certain size when they are not involved in production because when a production company is not making something, it is developing something.