Ms Mary Nash:

On hiring, the Deputy will be aware of the old system where a person was appointed as the head of department and he became the person who would bring in his friends or people he knew who were good at the job. We are moving away from that. On Screen Ireland, open hiring practices have built year on year, with crew calls becoming commonplace for most productions in 2022. That means that instead of somebody ringing his friends or bringing in people with whom he worked with previously, there is an open call, which means anybody can apply.

Another mitigating factor on the area of blacklisting the Deputy mentioned is the Safety to Create programme the Minister has been rolling out over the past year to year and a half. We ask companies to take a zero tolerance approach to a number of negative behaviours, one of which is victimisation, which is specifically defined as somebody who has raised an issue of being victimised because he or she raised an issue. From now on, we are asking people to sign a code where they will not allow victimisation in a company, a production company or whatever. Going forward, that should improve things.

On the area of the guilds, there is a lot of confusion about the guilds. In the areas of hair or make-up, for example, there would be a guild for hair. That guild would include people who have the skills to be heads of department but also all those down the pecking order of ability and experience. The heads of department might hire and fire people, but increasingly Screen Ireland is encouraging companies to move towards an open call. The people who are not heads of department are represented by SIPTU and they themselves are hired and fired. They are not doing the hiring and firing. Obviously, there are not 2,500 people hiring and firing in the film industry. Most of those may be freelancers but they are still represented by a trade union.