Mr. Gareth Lee:

I also want to reference Eímear Noone. Interestingly, she accessed some training through Screen Skills Ireland many years ago, which really helped her career. She accessed it when she was quite a young age. The remit of Screen Skills Ireland is on continuous professional development. This is where we do most of our work. More and more we see the need to try to be involved at the earlier level Deputy Cannon mentioned. The way we have tried to do this so far is to work with other stakeholders and empower and fund them to do some of the work on our behalf. We work quite closely with the Irish Film Institute on its careers and screen programme to promote careers in the screen industry to transition year students. We have also worked quite closely with young Irish film-makers on a summer programme relating to film-making and animation in order to get young people interested in both forms.

One of the first roles I was involved in when I joined Screen Skills Ireland just over two years ago was the development of a careers and screen website. This is a website into which we have put a lot of time and effort. It maps out all of the career roles available in animation and live action. There are well over 200 roles listed on the site. It is interesting that a lot of the time when we speak to people they do not realise there are that many roles available within the industry. There is definitely work to be done on promoting the roles available in the animation industry and promote them at that early level.

A career guidance review was conducted a year or two ago. Recommendations from that review are being implemented at present. There is definitely a value in us and other stakeholders linking in with the career guidance model to promote careers in the screen industries through career guidance counsellors. Specifically on animation, there could be more linkages with art teachers in schools. I have had some art teachers reach out to me over the years on animation workshops. More work could be done in this area to promote animation to secondary and primary school pupils.