Mr. James Hickey:

The important role the content levy could play would be to support indigenous production, particularly in the area of high-end value, such as TV drama and animation. It would also support Irish creative talent. If we have a levy paid to a funding agency and that agency assumes the role of making sure the projects it is funding are projects that support Irish creative talent, it will create a virtuous circle in which Irish content is able to be produced. The Senator is right that inflation and all sorts of other things have increased the cost of production. It is only with the extra funding that we are able to pay for that type of production in the first place. That funding is needed in order to make sure TV drama and animation support Irish creative talent. The most important thing to happen at this stage is for the levy to be established as soon as possible.

As the committee knows, the current situation is that large amounts of money are paid by Irish subscribers to services which provide content and are very often not based in Ireland. These organisations take large amounts of money out of the country. The levy would bring a small part of that back to Ireland so it can be invested through an agency supporting Irish creative talent and Irish producers who own rights to those works.

Television drama is a particularly good example. Indigenous television drama, as Ms Glennane mentioned in her submission, is struggling at the moment. That is a result of the cost but also of the lack of funding. Unless we put a levy production fund in place very soon, we will lose our competitive edge over other EU countries. Most other EU countries at this stage have already introduced either levies or investment obligations. Unless we keep up, we will lose that opportunity. Irish creative talent will lose that opportunity and we will fall behind. It is a simple equation.

Ireland is relatively unusual, in that a considerable amount of money goes out of the country in subscriptions paid to services which are not even based in Ireland. There is now a unique opportunity, which is being availed of under the audiovisual and media services, AVMS, directive. We can levy those services even though they are not based in Ireland because the directive allows that to happen. Only by getting them to contribute to Irish content will we be able to support that content. It is vital.

Television drama, animation, in particular, and feature films are expensive things to produce. The cost of an hour of television drama is at least €1 million, if not €1.5 million. That is the cost per episode and we need that money in place. RTÉ with its current level of funding is not able to pay that level of cost for television drama. The levy could create a situation whereby we have a television drama on every Sunday night on RTÉ. That would be the case 52 weeks per year. We could also fund Irish-language drama. The legislation requires 25% of funding to go to Irish-language content. We could also fund animation so that Irish children see young people's programming which is indigenously created by Irish artists and animators. All of those opportunities are there if we can being in the levy as quickly as possible. We need to do that. We must urge the new media commission to do that as soon as possible. That is the vital thing we need to do now.