Mr. Andrew Lowe:

I will endeavour to address all of that. I will take the Deputy's last question first. Our principal office is here in Dublin. We also have offices in Belfast and in London. We have 46 staff working between those three offices, with the majority here in Dublin. Those are full-time development, production, business affairs and finance staff who work across all of our projects all year round. We separately have a cinema and distribution business where we have a further 60 staff between Dublin and Galway. Many of them are full-time and some of them are part-time, especially in cinemas, given the nature of that business.

Going back to the Deputy's initial question on downtime between jobs and how people fare in that regard, there are a couple of things I would say about that. Not to overstate it, but the work tends to be quite intense. The days are long and there are bursts of very intense activity. Crew who work on television series in particular, because such series tend to be longer and could go on for five or six months, often tend to work those projects and then deliberately take time off. They may do a short film or a commercial, which is only a couple of days' commitment, but they do not necessarily want any other long-term commitments.

I have worked in the industry since the early 1990s and I have seen a sea change in that time. It was the case that there would be a couple of big, juicy projects per year and then slim pickings thereafter, and it was hard for people to sustain a career and their lifestyles on that basis. However, in truth, primarily due to the success of section 481 and the efforts of Screen Ireland, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, BAI, and even RTÉ, there is so much activity going on in the sector now that, as employers, we have the opposite problem. We struggle to find crew and it is very difficult to get people. They are so busy. Ms O'Shea spends a lot of time ringing around to heads of departments to try to establish who is available and to pencil people in for jobs we hope will come to fruition. We often find those people are already committed to other things. My sense of it is that downtime is less of an issue for crew than it might have been in the past. From the 1990s and into the 2000s, the working conditions that applied reflected the fact that it was freelance and not year-round employment. The rates of pay tended to reflect that. When people worked, they were well-paid, which also helped. There is a combination of things.

There are two practical things that could be considered by the committee. I know the timeframe for this Finance Bill may not permit this but it may be a discussion for the next 12 months. The first would be to look seriously at the question of the cap. I welcome Deputy Boyd Barrett's comments that he is supportive of the sector. I acknowledge he has been very clear on many occasions and that he would like to see more investment going into the sector, notwithstanding his concerns around aspects of it. The single thing that would change the landscape is looking at the cap. I will elaborate on that, if I may, and explain in technical terms. The section 481 is limited to €70 million of a budget.

If I was to come here tomorrow with a project of €150 million, only the first €70 million of that project would qualify for the section 481 tax credit. The rest of the spend would, effectively, be dead spend and there would be no additional benefit available. We run analyses all of the time. We ran an analysis recently on a big project where we run budgets for the UK, run budgets for Hungary, run budgets for Ireland, and where we try to compare what is available locally and what is the cost base locally. With a €150 million project one will find that the UK has no cap and Hungary has no cap. They are, straightaway, much more attractive locations for bigger projects of scale than Ireland is, because we have the cap. I say this as a company that has never come near the cap. We are not directly affected as we have never had an eligible spend close to €70 million, but perhaps we will one day. We are, however, indirectly affected and I will explain this point. The biggest budget film we made is a project called "Poor Things". It is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos who directed "The Favourite". He is a director we have worked with a lot. It is a period film set in Victorian London, Paris, Lisbon, Alexandria and on a steamship. All of those locations were to be built on sound stages. We wanted to shoot it here in Ireland. We had difficulty doing that so we looked at the UK and all over Europe. We ended up shooting in Budapest in Hungary. The entire film was shot there. Ardmore Studios was too small to take the film because of the size of the film, which had a budget of $60 million. Troy Studios in Limerick would have been perfect for us. We spent a year talking to Troy Studios but between chopping and changing, and as we developed the cast - we had Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe - we attached all of these people but their dates changed, and then we would go back a few months later to ask what their availability is like, and unfortunately, at the time, Troy Studios was full and they could not accommodate us then.

The biggest restraining factor for growing employment and growing the sector in Ireland is the lack of adequate studio space. For anyone who is looking to develop a film studio, the biggest issue they have is the cap on section 481. Those studios are such a huge capital investment and they need to know there will be a throughput of projects that can be counted on for a period of ten or 20 years.

If the cap was addressed it would bring in bigger budget projects. If they come in, it is worth remembering that the section 481 tax credit ultimately contributes about 24% to 25% of a budget. For every €1 that is attracted by section 481, €3 is coming in from overseas being spent on local goods and services. There is an opportunity to leverage ever greater investments from overseas on bigger budget projects. The UK has very successfully learnt that lesson and exploited it in the sense that they have built many studios and have huge productions of scale shooting in the UK, none of which we have the facilities to accommodate in Ireland. That is the first point. I apologise to Deputy Canney for the rather long answer to his question.

The second point may be of more interest to the Deputy on the regional development uplift. As a company, 12 years ago we went to Connemara to do a recce for shooting a film with a script we had called "The Guard". It was a first-time director. It was a challenging film to get finance for. We had a limited amount of resources. We concluded that unfortunately we could not afford to shoot in Galway because of the cost of bringing in the cast and some of the crew, putting everyone up and accommodation, and bringing in all of the equipment. It was just going to be too expensive. Happily, at the time the Irish Film Board had a pilot scheme which was a regional development fund. They were investing small amounts of money in projects that were prepared to shoot in the regions. We qualified for that. That extra money from Screen Ireland allowed us to shoot in Galway. Arguably, to the benefit of everybody involved and particularly creatively, "The Guard" ended up as a beautifully shot film, shot in the place where it is set.