Film Industry
Dail Éireann — 2021-11-11
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

What the EU says is countries are supposed to create with state aid to the film industry a permanent pool of skills and labour. Virtually nobody has a job in the Irish film industry. They go from film to film, as the producers keep saying. In cases before the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, at the moment, film producers have come in and said to people who worked on those film productions funded by public money, "You are not my employee and you never were." That is what is going on.
Every film production is funded with section 481 tax relief and with grants from Screen Ireland. The people are paying - this is the people's money - but the money ends up in the hands of a small number of film producers. IDA Ireland sold off the bit of film infrastructure that it had. It had a one third share in it. We put money into it and into Troy Studios, which now end up in the hands of an American real estate firm. It is cultural treason and it is shocking. The EU requires us to build up companies of scale for state aid and a permanent pool of workers. We have neither but we pumped out billions of euro and got nothing for it.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-11-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-11-11