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

Many of these issues are complex and nuanced, but one issue that is beyond question is that people involved in co-productions from other theatre companies who work on the Abbey Theatre stage should be paid Abbey Theatre rates. There is a two-tier pay structure. The other point, which the theatre forum people made, is that the smaller theatre companies have been effectively dismantled over recent years because of cuts in funding. We end up with the theatre community taking lumps out of each other in a desperate scramble to get the small amount of work that is available in the Abbey Theatre or in the places where there is funding. The bottom line is we are not valuing arts and culture. I repeat the point made about film as well. There are people working in the film industry, a publicly funded industry, for 20 years yet they have no jobs. It is similar in the arts. Some 80% of our artists are earning approximately one third of the average industrial wage. It is totally precarious and there is no security. Our spending on arts is at one of the lowest levels in Europe. I was talking to somebody who worked in a theatre in Germany.

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