Ms Mary Nash:

I will go through them as they appear.

The first is the arts organisations that are funded. The largest number of those are funded by the Arts Council, with a smaller number funded by the Department. For the individual artists, almost all of those are funded by the Arts Council. The pilot live performance scheme is a Covid-19 scheme. We introduced the pilot in 2020 and we funded 58 organisations under that. The pilot worked very well for the industry and the Department did the full-scale programme in 2021. That funded almost 250 organisations.

The feature film projects from Screen Ireland look very impressive there, but 2020 was a poor year because production had stopped for a significant portion of the year and then restarted in the autumn. A lot of the funding that should have happened in 2020 fell into 2021, so 2021 was a record year for audiovisual in Ireland. When there is a record year like that, we are looking to 2022 and asking what is going to happen this year because 2021 was so good. We are particularly proud of the film skills development programme. Section 481 is the film tax relief for the industry. In the latter half of 2019, we introduced the linking of much stronger training requirements for section 481 recipients. The success of that programme really emerged in late 2020 and in 2021. Instead of having trainees who were more or less new entrants to the programme, the emphasis we now place on it is lifelong learning. One could have a new entrant to the industry or one could have a very experienced Irish director shadowing an international director, such as Neil Jordan, here in Ireland. That would be a training intervention.

Also this year we are pushing bystander training, bullying and harassment training and unconscious bias training, which will be free. We hope that in two or three years' time, everybody who works in the industry will be required to do that training. Initially, in the next year or so, we will be asking the principals, such as the director and the producer, to have done that training. As it is free and each of the modules takes approximately an hour, it is not a huge burden on the industry and the individuals in it. It is to be hoped it will bring us-----