Ms Susan Kirby:

I fully endorse Mr. Hickey’s comments, and I will make one addition to them. Screen Producers Ireland also supports a number of our producers. We have a regional base of producers all over Ireland. We have Irish language producing companies and we understand that circa 20% of the fund will be allocated to Irish language production. I wanted to add that additional point to Mr. Hickey’s previous point.

We have advocated for the increase in investment into the Irish independent production sector through RTÉ. Our producer members are the largest creative partner to RTÉ. I refer to my colleague who is present, Ms Callery, from Shinawill. Some of the top shows which are seen in people’s homes are produced by Screen Producers Ireland members. We have come from the level, which one of the members who spoke previously mentioned, of €80 million in 2008, down to €40 million now. We are advocating to have that reinstated.

TG4 is a publisher-broadcaster. What that means is that, barring news and current affairs, its entire catalogue of content is produced from the Irish independent production sector. We are advocating that there should be an increase of funding for TG4. That funding is part of the ecology. It supports regional based producers, creating content and telling Irish stories, in this case, trí mheán na Gaeilge in the Irish language. In the case of RTÉ, we are advocating that the independent producing sector can produce significant content of quality at a more cost-competitive price point than can RTÉ. We are advocating that as its main creative partner, as RTÉ itself calls us, an increased investment in this sector is just course-correcting us. It would bring us back to the previous levels.

It may speak to the point I made earlier about the concept of how one creates a project and a production and the costs attached to that. It is a patchwork and a portfolio of funding. At the moment, the domestic market does not have the bandwidth to invest adequately to allow producers to create. Not necessarily “Normal People”, of which we obviously are very proud, but what about the projects like "Normal People" that are sitting on the desks of independent producers in Ireland currently and are not being made? We cannot compete. Ms Hamilton made the point very well earlier that we cannot compete globally because domestically, the funding is nowhere near where it should be.

We are fully advocating that we want to see a reinstatement of RTÉ funding. I might ask Ms Callery from Shinawill to speak on that from a practical point of view from her experience in producing and with the RTÉ fund.