At the end of last month, the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar) completed his trade mission to LA, California.  The two-day affair targeted the next stage of the TV and movie industries in Ireland, in an attempt to learn something from the LA scene.    Varadkar met with a variety of leaders in all sorts of related industries such as Hulu, Disney and Netflix.

In Ireland, the audio-visual industry’s estimated worth is €1bn.  TV and animation accounts for approximately €700m of this. The Irish government hopes that this sector will double within the next five years through an increase in production activity and doubling the number of employees in the industry.

LA is definitely the place to learn about the media industry, especially TV and audio-visual.  The 2017 Otis Report on the Creative Economy of California found in 2015 that a whopping 1.6 million jobs were added to the economy in the creative sector, generating 759,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs for workers who collectively earned $56.9 billion. So it’s potentially a good industry to work in.