Mr. Anthony Muldoon:

I have been working with SPI for about six and a half years. Obviously I have watched the Deputy’s contributions over those years with keen interest. One of the things that is most clear from those contributions is the Deputy’s support for the arts and culture sector in Ireland and his support for the film and TV sector. As he always says, he believes in increasing investment, as do we. So we agree in that regard. We also agree on the need for increased domestic production. One of the statistics that was mentioned earlier on section 481 is the 75%:25% split, whereby 75% of the funding is incoming and 25% is indigenous. I think the Deputy is right. We should definitely be looking to increase the ratio of indigenous to incoming production because that will provide additional jobs and projects for people to work on throughout a 12-month period.

Again, on intellectual property, I completely agree. The Deputy is absolutely right. When it comes to buy-out contracts, which the Deputy has spoken about at the committee in the past, producers are subject to buy-out contracts on incoming productions. One way one can scale up as a producer is to own one’s own intellectual property. Ireland is very strong on that too, around merchandising and so on. When someone develops a domestic production from the start, they will have a far greater right to intellectual property as a producer and perhaps others along the line. I completely agree on that. That is why we support increased funding for Screen Ireland and why we look to increase funding from RTÉ and others.

On the piece around sharing of IP with creative talent, I know the committee has spoken in the past about the copyright directive with the wider creative talent. It will be very glad to know that over the past year, through a Screen Ireland funded mediation process, SPI along with Animation Ireland and the writers, directors, screen composers and actors have sat around a table trying to figure out how best to implement the copyright directive in Ireland. Obviously, the directive was introduced in 2021 and is all about balancing rights. We are very pleased to say that in the next seven to ten days that SPI and AI are going to share with the writers, directors, composers and actors a set of interim guidelines. That is a set of guidelines that would set out how best to share in profit pools and other measures from the directive until such a time as it is legally allowed for SPI, for example, to enter into a collective agreement with the writers or directors.

As the committee knows and has mentioned before, with Irish Equity there was a cinema agreement that fell two and a half years ago. I am very pleased to say that we delivered a revised cinema agreement to Equity two weeks ago. We are now waiting for it to come back to us in order that we can start negotiation on that agreement. When that is done we will have three separate agreements with Equity. There will be docudrama, TV drama and a cinema agreement, all of which will contain profit pools as per the contract. On all those things we agree. I know the Deputy wanted Ms Honan to come in on IP.