Celtic audiovisual connections need to be cherished in world of global content

The Celtic Media Festival held in Dungloe, Co Donegal, this week finished on a high for Irish talent, with Inscéal’s Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin taking the Spirit of the Festival Torc award and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta winning the Torc for radio station of the year.

But while the awards lend a competitive note to proceedings, the festival is really a celebration of the connections between broadcasters, producers and other content makers in the television, film, radio and digital media industry and the chance to form new ones.

The screen industry, in particular, is one where scale counts. Single-nation and regional broadcasters compete with global tech platforms, while independent producers – especially those based in geographically peripheral areas – can feel like minnows compared with the well-funded production subsidiaries of colossal multinational content companies.

The opportunity for industry participants based in the Celtic nations and regions to share notes and frustrations, exchange knowledge and have the conversations that lead to commissions at a later date is, therefore, more important than ever.

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The BBC’s current swathe of local radio cuts – the subject of multiple strikes by the National Union of Journalists – threaten to deprive people, quite literally, of a voice and lead to greater homogenisation in output. This is quite the shame, especially as elsewhere within the BBC, the attention paid to regional production has yielded such clear benefits.

The decentralised television production targets set and monitored annually by the BBC, for instance, have contributed to the development of an experienced drama production base at BBC Northern Ireland, with Belfast becoming the home for network-wide BBC drama including Line of Duty, Bloodlands and this year’s excellent debut Blue Lights. TG4 is now working with BBC Northern Ireland on a returnable Donegal-set murder mystery series.

“Quotas are really important for public service television,” TG4 director general Alan Esslemont told the festival. “Without quotas, all of the UK [broadcasting industry] would be in London and things wouldn’t change.”

In Ireland, TG4 has been the key agent in creating regional as well as linguistic plurality in the Irish public-service broadcasting ecosystem. Those are not its only considerations: within the Cine4 feature film development scheme, for example, applicants must also show they have gender balance across their creative teams.

Indeed, tracking and improving media diversity in all its nuanced, interrelated forms was a recurring theme of this year’s Celtic Media Festival. The industry backdrop might have changed utterly since 1980, the year of the first festival, but one shared ambition remains unchanged: meaningful representation and authenticity in an industry where neither can be taken for granted.