Ms Deirdre Donaghy:

It goes back to some of the points I made earlier. We have to work with the audiovisual industry itself to work through these issues. It is not possible for the Department of Finance to define appropriate training and so on. We need to work with the sector to identify what it can do and then we can build conditions around that.

Any breaches in employment law are a matter for the courts and the Workplace Relations Commission. Who polices the criteria? The Revenue Commissioners are responsible for operating the tax system. It is down to us to give them criteria that they can effectively follow up on. There is no point in us putting something in if it is not operable in practice. That is where we need input from the sector to help us to design something that is operable and capable of being policed and tracked. From our point of view, given that it is a tax credit, the ultimate sanction we have is withdrawal of the credit. The much more important sanctions for anyone breaking employment law would be through the courts and through the appropriate channels for that.

This is something we have to do with those in the sector. We can work with them. As I am sure the Deputy will be aware, with any issue that comes in, we are made aware of issues and then we get information from all sides involved in those issues. We then have to try to pick through it and reach conclusions. With something like this, we have to get constructive involvement from the sector. We are trying to do that through working with Screen Training Ireland, the new training forums that have been set up and through meeting representatives of the sector to hear what people are saying and look at what is being done in other jurisdictions on training, tracking of trainees and so on. We try to learn from those practices to see what we can do to improve the credit and make it more feasible for Revenue to enforce whatever conditions we can attach to it.