Ms Deirdre Donaghy:

I will address a couple of issues. I am sure Ms Nash will have a different perspective. She would have much more day-to-day engagement with the sector. We tend to look at it from the perspective of the overall functioning of the credit. As Ms Nash mentioned, issues regarding employment have been raised over the past four or five years through this committee and the Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, by Deputy Boyd Barrett, through parliamentary questions and so on. Because of that, we have met with many representatives and representative bodies in the sector. We have made an effort to try to hear all the voices.

One thing that I think is useful in trying to understand the position is when I look at employment in the film sector, I would not be happy working in it because I like to have a desk with a box with my shoes under it. In addition, I look to go to the same place every day. For that reason, I am not responsible for our creative culture because I would be bad at it. To some extent, we have to recognise that we cannot impose our views on how the sector works. Having said that, we equally do not want a sector that does not provide quality employment within the bounds of how that sector works globally. The CBA we did contains a great deal of information on productions and how they work. There is a chart that shows how much time in productions is spent on pre-production, production and post-production. When I think of a job, I tend to think of something continuous. If people have copies of the CBA with them, there is a production duration chart on page 26.

In 2021, on average, about a quarter of the time was spent in pre-production, about a third of the time in production, and what is left, about 14%, in post-production. Not everybody is employed for all of that. There is a small number in pre-production. Peak employment is during actual production. It tails off to a much smaller number in post-production. Nothing we do can change that. That is just how an audiovisual production is made. It will differ, with animation being much longer term and live action being much shorter.

What does quality employment mean within that structure? There are different voices and opinions, including those of employer representative bodies. Some are looking for more steady or continuous employment. Others will come to us and say what they liked about the industry is the fact that they can move from project to project, that they can choose to take time off or to work on different types of productions. In the context of the industry as it operates globally, quality employment means that there is a steady supply of employment. People know that they can take on a job for three weeks or three months then, when that comes to an end, they can decide to take three or four weeks off because they know they will be able to get another job after that. The consistency of the pipeline is what we are told is quality employment in that sector.

Much has been done, as Ms Nash stated. There were concerns that when the focus on industry development was on training, people would be training forever. That is not good. That is why the focus has now moved more to lifelong skills development. Once people have been working for certain length of time, it is recognised that they have moved up the food chain of the particular area they are in, for want of a better word.