Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely. My point is that if we are going to have certainty across the board, there must be balance across the whole industry.

I am very interested in what Ms Honan said about retaining the intellectual property. I would like her to elaborate on that. I am not quite sure what she means. I am particularly interested in it because I know the actors and performers have been asking about their intellectual property rights. Ms Honan can probably elaborate on this but it seems that a lot of the time, the producers here or international co-producers coming in are insisting that people sign away their intellectual property rights and therefore the revenues and royalties do not come back here. Is that what she means? I would be interested to know. I think the actors and performers are right about that. If the State is going to put a lot of money in, the value of the intellectual property and the downstream revenues should flow back to people here.

My last point is very pertinent to the regional stuff and the question of providing certainty. While of course we will need to have international co-productions and obviously there is value in that, do people think that if the balance is heavily in favour of international productions, which may or may not come even with the best situation in the world, we are vulnerable to things going pear-shaped? Economists are saying that our dependence on FDI makes us very vulnerable. Therefore, it seems to me that we have to ramp up domestic production and make it viable. We need to cultivate our domestic industry, stories, culture and all that kind of stuff which I do not think we do enough of. We are too dependent on the foreign stuff. In a way, there is a kind of connection between that and giving people greater security in their jobs, to which there seems to be resistance in some quarters. I would like some responses on that. I want to see the thing thrive and to see certainty, but it has to be for workers and it has to be across the board. I wonder if the overdependence on big international co-productions is ultimately undermining our ability to develop that sort of sustainable domestic film industry.