Ms Elaine Geraghty:

That is what we have at the moment and that is what we are dealing with and thankfully it runs until 2024. I will try to answer all of the Deputy's points and if I miss any, he should let me know. I will just take a step back and talk about the industry and how it is constructed. I touched on it in the overview that I gave in the first five minutes. I will ask Stephen and Siobhán to speak to this because they are company owners. The role of production companies and their job is to create opportunities for employment. I have set out what those producers do and the kind of people who work as part of their core staff. The responsibility of producers is to find projects, create projects, get them funded, get them produced, make them successful and give the opportunity to create the kind of employment the Deputy is talking about. That is the role. The Deputy talked about the EU directive around a permanent pool of talent; I would focus on the word "pool" as opposed to the word "permanent." Thankfully in this country we have a fantastic pool of very talented crew who work across all of those genres, TV, documentary, drama as the Deputy described, and film. They have been available and are available. They are incredibly talented. We have a permanent pool of workers. In terms of what that looks like and what their day-to-day looks like, our industry is no different from any other territory where a screen industry exists. It operates in exactly the same way.

The role of the producer is to create the opportunity, to be enterprising and create employment opportunities and to add value to the economy. That is the role of the production company per se. Often they are managing the opportunity of two, three or four projects at any one time, which is very challenging in its own right, but that is when employment is created. To suggest it could be any other way is really not accurate. It cannot be any other way. The purpose of the pool is that we have available talent and crew when we need it, and we have that. The Deputy will remember how after the culture committee hearings in the Oireachtas back in January and February, as a direct result of what was being said at those meetings, the film guilds of this country organised to tell the Deputy and those who may have a different view of the industry how their industry works for them and how they wish to work. Yes, it is project-by-project but the point about what we do as professional producers is that we create as many projects as possible and, ideally, have so many that we can operate and offer work 365 days a year. That is the model and it is not going to change.

Let me take a step back to address this idea about not being supported in terms of security and the other words the Deputy used around the sense that perhaps people who are engaged and employed in the industry do not have protections. We as employers are under the same scrutiny and subject to the same employment legislation as absolutely every other employer in the land. That is the first thing. The second thing-----