Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

We have run out of time sooner than anticipated. However, I will avail of part of this slot and Deputy Ó Snodaigh will avail of the remainder.

I broadly welcome the Bill before us. The Green Party supports the idea of increasing the capacity of the Irish Film Board to invest and use that investment to increase both the number of projects and their economic benefit in the country. The Minister has highlighted the increase in the number of projects and the value of the projects with money invested in Ireland in 2006 to date over the figure for 2005.

One concern is that the listing supplied by the Minister consists largely of television projects. However, one of the remits of the Irish Film Board is to get an appropriate balance between mainstream cinema, television and new media, which is not mentioned in this Bill. I also regret that this debate is so truncated that we do not have an opportunity of discussing the wider issues because visual media, especially the new media, IT the use of computers, and home computers in particular, is very much where this industry is heading both in terms of downloads of mainstream cinema and the popularity of websites such as YouTube. The Irish Film Board therefore needs to have in place a strategy to adapt to the new reality that is new media and new film making. This Bill could have provided an opportunity to address some of those issues to put the policy remit in its new context. Unfortunately today is the last day of the session before Christmas and another piece of legislation is being rushed.

There are other aspects of the work of the Irish Film Board that deserve comment, for instance, the support in regard to festivals such as the Cork Film Festival, which is the major international film festival here. As a Cork Deputy I very much welcome that. The inclusion of a competition element in festivals, concentrating on short films in particular, is something the Cork Film Festival has greatly encouraged in recent years. It is fairly apt, given that in literature terms Cork is also the Irish centre for the short story as much as anything else. The idea of promoting short films both as a way of training film makers and those involved in film production, and of valuing the short film as an art form in itself, is something the Minister commented on in his opening speech, and the Green Party would be very supportive of such measures.

Another aspect of Irish Film Board's work on which I would like to comment in the brief time that is available to me is the need for clearer policy statements as to where we stand on the idea of co-production. Where is the added value that the country achieves subsequently? The Minister has mentioned "The Wind That Shakes The Barley", a film made in Ireland with Irish actors, by a British director, largely funded from outside of this country, yet reflecting a period of this country's history. If we want cultural statements and historical statements to go out about who we are as a people, the production element of any large-scale film is something over which we need to have more control.

Another aspect of many of the films that have been made in Ireland in the past number of years, valuable as they have been, is that the film makers have used Ireland merely as a staging post. The background was irrelevant. They were here because of the tax incentives. It did not really matter whether "King Arthur" was made in Ireland or in New Zealand. We need a film industry which will reflect Ireland culturally, as the Spanish and Polish film industries have been doing for several decades. The Minister needs to look to his policy remit by offering more guidance through legislation and in terms of how resources are provided by the Irish Film Board to bring us to that level.

While this Bill is limited in scope to the capacity of the Irish Film Board to invest and the House is united in wanting to ensure it invests wisely, I hope the Minister will give us the opportunity of holding a serious debate on the future of the Irish film industry.

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