Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to start by congratulating my cousin, Cillian Murphy, on his great win - best actor at the Oscars the weekend before last. He is my third cousin. I do not think he is aware that he is my cousin. Cillian, if you are listening, you have always been my favourite third cousin, and next time you are in west Cork - I know he is a fan of Connolly's in west Cork - we will go for a pint.

It was an extraordinary moment. Certainly, Cork people were walking taller that weekend. There was a lot of pride. Right throughout the country, there was pride. I think it was a culmination of this build-up to something big happening in terms of acknowledgement of the incredible independent sector that is there, but also the acting and writing talent we have.

It was interesting in his interview after that Cillian acknowledged that in Ireland we do support artists. I think that is true. We do. Maybe it is not always as much as we should or not always in the ways that we should, but certainly we have a great tradition here of supporting artists. We can certainly do better.

There is no doubt we are doing phenomenal things here in film and television. The past few years, in particular, have highlighted that. It is always the likes of "The Banshees of Inisherin" that are pointed to, but I think "An Cailín Ciúin" is a far more important moment in terms of the Irish film sector in particular, because of the importance of the language but also because it is was a stunningly beautiful simple film that had a massive impact. Magical things are certainly happening throughout Ireland and that has to be acknowledged. A lot of that has to do with some of the people who are in this room today, and that has to be acknowledged as well.

Here is where the "but" comes. Despite all of that and despite all the success, what I am not hearing today and what I have not been hearing over the past six months is a clear direction or clear plan in terms of how we will continue to incentivise, or even incentivise in a bigger or more strategic way, regional development. The regional uplift was great. It did great things in many areas but, for example, and I have no problem throwing down the Cork jersey here, Cork was obviously excluded. Despite the fact we were all so proud of Cillian and his achievements in the county, that is still a big issue.

The conversation today is about how we invest in the regional areas. I represent west Cork - Cork South-West - and that is where I would like to see investment happen, but under the state aid maps that were in place in terms of that 5%, Cork was left out. Screen Ireland and the Department, through Ms Nash, might be able to answer the following. What is the clear plan in terms of ensuring that, outside of Dublin and Wicklow, the independent production companies but also these small independent studios we seeing pop up in rural areas get a fair share of that investment? I believe there are two things that need to happen here. We need to see this increase in cultural funding which is going towards those productions that are in our native tongue and that have decided to take regional areas for locations, but we also need to see capital investment. Senator Byrne often talks about the idea of an arts capital fund, which is a fantastic idea. Certainly, at the very least, we need capital funding to go into infrastructure around the regional areas of Ireland, because we have the crew.

I always cite this example in west Cork. We have seen the establishment of the West Cork Film Studios recently, which is a phenomenal success story. We have the crew, the make-up artists, the location managers, the writers, the actors and production managers. Right across the board, they are here, but we need to keep them here, and we will not keep them here unless we have that infrastructure.

We obviously have the locations. As bad as "Irish Wish" was - and God it was pretty hard to watch - the locations were extraordinary. There is no doubt about that. We have those locations. We have them in west Cork from Mizen Head to Kinsale. I sound like a broken record on this, but we have the crew, we have the locations and what we are missing is investment in studios. We need those studios to keep the crew here. I will go back to the Department, perhaps Ms Finnegan and Coimisiun na Meán as well on this. Do they think it would be appropriate to take a two-pronged investment approach? That would be investment in the cultural side of and the productions but also investment in the infrastructure and studios in particular.