Film industry boosts the hotel box office

In a week which saw Amazon Prime pull the plug on long-standing Dublin production Ripper Street, presumably to keep its new signing Jeremy Clarkson in tailored jackets and bad jeans, there's even more worrying news for the domestic TV and film industry.

Scotland’s increased use as a location for productions has led to our Celtic cousins in Edinburgh overtaking Dublin as the hotel capital of Europe, bar London.

A Europe-wide report suggests Edinburgh's occupancy rates will reach 83 per cent this year, one per cent higher than Dublin's. And Bruce Cartwright of forecasters PwC Scotland said the growth was "boosted in part by interest in a growing film and TV industry, which has seen the likes of Outlander and other shows filmed here".

Latest figures indicate film spend in Scotland nearly quadrupled from £12m (€15.5m) in 2013 to a record £45.8 (€59m) in 2014, with recent shoots including BBC series Stag, Skyfall, Macbeth and Slow West – the latter two starring Michael Fassbender – in addition to the Starz drama Outlander. Areas popular with production companies also gain revenue through tourism, as Belfast would confirm if it had any free time between Game of Thrones tours.

Still, Ireland's fighting back. Troy Studios in Castletroy is due to open in the next few months, helping to increase capacity for productions and contributing €70 million to the local economy (according to Limerick City and County Council who helped fund it). And last year, Michael Noonan upped the tax break for productions from 28 to 32 per cent, allowed the not-insignificant salaries of Hollywood actors to qualify for tax relief, and increased the cap on eligible expenditure from €50 to €70 million – all of which suggests the Ripper Street-shaped hole in the industry may well be gaffer- taped over soon enough.