Fluidity of technological change means cultural industries should be more central than ever

Slugger O'Toole

In today's Cargo of Bricks, I speak to Ali FitzGibbon and discover how the long slow and steady bottom-up development of Northern Ireland's cultural industries over the last thirty years provided the backbone for the recent big payoffs from TV and film, but which has yet to see any peace dividend...

In it we cover...

• The Covid lockdown's withdrawal of vast numbers of people from the workforce has shown just how crucial culture and the arts are to us. But the pipeline behind NetFlix, the BBC, and even the National Theatre in London and the Abbey in Dublin has halted, and creators are not getting paid.
• Local companies export new and very different accounts of life in Northern Ireland from the more negative ones the world has been used to hearing from us through news and current affairs. How do we maintain those connections when travel is more limited than before.
• More generally let's review what work is, and how we pay for it. The current basic income support regime was designed for full-employment. Portfolio work in the unsubsidised cultural industries left many ineligible for government support during Covid, and unable to pay their mortgages.