Broadway urged as blueprint

OIREACHTAS ARTS AND CULTURE COMMITTEE:IRELAND COULD create hundreds of jobs by taking on elements of New York's Broadway theatre model, chairwoman of the Arts Council Pat Moylan told the Oireachtas arts and culture committee yesterday.

She pointed out that Broadway supported 44,000 local jobs in the 2008/2009 season and contributed $5.1 billion (€4.1 billion) to the New York economy.

“I am not saying that Dublin should seek to recreate Broadway to scale. Instead, what we should be doing is taking what we can from this model and applying it at home to maximum economic advantage,” she said.

“That means recognising the potential for employment that exists in theatre supporting future development.”

Ms Moylan was one of a number of people from the film and stage industry who addressed the committee on promoting investment and jobs in film, theatre and stage production.

Labour’s Michael D Higgins, a former minister for arts and culture said he hoped this would be the last time the creative sector would have to justify its existence to any government.

“I recall my own experience of having every year to fight for Section 35 [film production tax incentive] and the view in the Department of Finance – which did such a successful job in contributing to the destruction of Ireland’s reputation – was that these weren’t real jobs,” he said.

Mr Higgins said the Arts Council should list all the accountancy firms that had studied the area.“It should now be accepted by all departments, including the most backward, such as the Department of Finance, that this area is for real.”

Recalling the drive to encourage investment in the film industry in the 1990s , he said “the suits” in the investment community didn’t want to know anything about film. “They could have been making galvanised buckets and it didn’t matter.”

Mr Higgins also said he was “far from happy at the openness, transparency and way in which the commissioning system works in the Irish television sector”.

He said this needed to be looked at and expressed concern about the difficulties faced by filmmakers trying to make a living here.