Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all of the witnesses. This committee is honoured to have them here representing such a breadth of talent in this country. That is the very essence of this committee and we are honoured to have them.

I was struck by Mr. Roche's comment about writing music and then asking what he should do next to put all of the other components together.

His comment brought back to me an experience from this summer, when Senator Malcolm Byrne and I visited Ashford Studio in Wicklow, where we met the legendary producer Morgan O'Sullivan on the set of "Vikings". Malcolm and I had not been recruited to be part of the show; we were deemed too good-looking, our skin was too soft and our features were too nice to be part of a rugged set like that, but we had the ruthless streak, all right.

Mr. O'Sullivan made a point about pathways, and this is what I want to focus on with our guests. He said the country was devoid of pathways for new writers. Even though we are renowned as a literary country, the lack of pathways to get young people writing for shows that are produced here was striking to us. His ask was similar to that of our guests and related to creating pathways to get that basic talent, such as that which we are lucky enough to see Mr. Donnelly have on screen, to the end point. We need to be able to bring the statements of our guests to the relevant people to try to create those pathways and make them happen. As Mr. Donnelly mentioned, he decided to give it a go and he was lucky to make it, but he started in St. Mary's Musical Society in my hometown, Navan. New talent was presented at the AIMS awards this summer in Killarney to Katie Fitzsimons, who won the award for best actress in a supporting role in a production by St Mary's Musical Society of The Wizard of Oz. We can see the young talent is there, but it is about having the pathways to ensure their success.

We talked earlier about the barriers to domestic production and Ms Kelleher referred in her statement to the costs associated with that. We may have a critical mass of young people, but do we have a critical mass of audiences to balance out that production costs Mr. Campbell spoke about, or is it a case of needing massive Government subvention to make that a reality? This applies equally to the music societies. St. Mary's Musical Society in Navan has been on the go since the 1960s. Its costs for putting on shows, and I am sure the costs of all our guests' societies throughout the country, have risen exponentially. From an amateur point of view, they too might comment on facing those costs.