Ms Désirée Finnegan:

To add to the question of policy areas and section 481, we have just recently established a Los Angeles office. We have relocated our inward production executive from here to Los Angeles to really help build those relationships and focus. As Ms Bergin said, we work on both aspects in parallel and work very hard to maintain the right balance between both. We feel that the growth on the international side can help us build the local Irish industry as well.

In terms of section 481 there are three areas we have been focused on. It is a very competitive incentive and the regional uplift has been a strong example of policy that we think helped attract some of those bigger productions to the regions. There are some areas around which individuals are eligible for the incentive that we are working through. Ms Bergin mentioned the expenditure ceiling. For us it is about building the entire ecosystems and when we see examples that Ms Bergin referred to of visual effects work or animation work, if the live-action portion of a large-scale project go elsewhere when it reaches that limit, it makes us less competitive at that scale.

This is particularly relevant when we want to attract large-scale franchises or tent-pole feature films. They tend to be very large-scale in their budgets and it becomes much more challenging to keep the entire project within Ireland. Deputy Munster asked earlier about the recipients of funding. That would see a broadening out of that funding going to the visual effects sector in Ireland and to animation, and hopefully would see the entire project from start to finish retained in Ireland.