Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the Taoiseach said, this committee also deals with the area of arts and culture so I will continue to draw his attention to the film industry because €80 million goes out in grants from the Irish Film Board and section 481 tax relief. I will put it dramatically so that it will draw, I hope, the Taoiseach's attention. I do not expect him to know everything about this.

There is something rotten in the Irish film industry. The law governing section 481 requires that section 481 tax relief - €70 million per year - provide "an effective stimulus to film making in the State through, among other things, the provision of quality employment and training opportunities". That is the law. There is no training system in the film industry. Someone can be a trainee for years, be paid the trainee rate and have no career progression and no certainty of any kind of future employment no matter how long he or she has been in it. If the person steps out of line once with the production company that is in receipt of all this money, that person will not work in the industry again. That is how it works. It is project to project and it is a different kind of industry but it involves the provision of €80 million that is supposed to create an industry when nobody knows whether they will have a job next week.

Twelve companies are the recipients of this money. I went to the trouble of meeting the Comptroller and Auditor General for two hours two weeks ago to ask him to look into this. That is how seriously I take this. When I ask those 12 companies that received €183 million in tax relief in the past three years how many people they employ, they cannot give an answer because the number is three or four. That is not on. There is something wrong in the industry. People in the industry accept that it is project to project but something is wrong if the same production company that is getting all this money can employ a person for one project but say to that person when the next project comes along in a month or two that they are not taking that person because they asked about overtime or they complained about working hours in excess of the working time directive.

I am asking the Taoiseach to look at this. While we should give lots of money to arts and film because it is a very important industry, it must be an industry where there are some rights for employees and some sort of expectation of being able to work in the industry over their lifetime so that if people do not do something terrible, they will continue to be employed in that industry, because it is public money.

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