Mr. James Hickey:

The Senator raised a very interesting point. There is a real need for us as a country to look at our policy regarding the cultural and creative industries overall. One of the items on today's agenda is the creative economy. We need to look first at what the creative economy is in Ireland. It is probably somewhere between 4% and 6% of Irish GDP. The creative economy is enormous. It ranges across the arts and film and television production. It also includes design, advertising, various other creative areas and, most importantly and curiously, in Ireland, software development, which is treated as part of the cultural and creative economies, in accordance with the definitions currently being used in Europe and the UK. The UK has been extremely successful in promoting its creative economy. We have a certain amount to learn from what it has done and what is being done in Brussels as regards the development of policy for the cultural and creative industries.

It is estimated that possibly as much as 6% to 8% of employment in Ireland is in the creative economy. For that scale of economic impact, we should develop policies that would support that cultural and economic activity. A discussion on how to promote the cultural and creative industries in Ireland, on a very broad basis, needs to be put on the political table at this point because their scale is very important. Europe is very busy on this. Somewhere between 6 million and 8 million people in Europe work in the creative economies. That is the level of employment that exists. These industries are estimated to account for 4% to 5% of GDP across the whole of Europe. We need to look at these areas. The creative industries in Europe are larger than car manufacturing. If we consider that kind of scale, we then realise what we need to look at.

The most important thing to say about the cultural and creative industries relates to how we define them. The basic underlying definition is that they all support products that are protected by intellectual property, particularly copyright. Therefore, the role of copyright in the cultural and creative economy is vital in the way it underpins that creative economy. These are the issues that need to be developed on a policy basis in future.