Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The arts committee in 2018 recommended such a stakeholder forum. It should have happened but never did and we are the worse for it. It should happen as a matter of urgency.

The DAC structure seems incredibly problematic. They are like mushrooms jumping up and down. They appear, disappear and make the whole thing opaque. You do not know where your intellectual property rights are gone. Nobody quite knows who the employer is. Nobody wants a cent less going into film; in fact, I think we want all the money going into section 481 and more to go into stimulating the sort of industry witnesses have described and would like to see, with dignity for all involved and experience, gelling into a growing and developing industry. It seems to me the DAC structure and the way we are funding via section 481 militate against that. If there were a model that had the same amount or more but that did not go through this opaque, complex structure and was done in another way, maybe more directly funded, might that not be better? Connected to that, would we learn a bit from talking directly to film producers? We have never had a chance to talk to them in all of this. The witnesses say they do not know where their intellectual property is, while our previous panellists said we should ask the film producers. Nobody seems to know but somebody must know. I thank both witnesses.