IRISH cinemagoers turned out in droves to lap up Hollywood blockbusters last year, but locally made films failed their big-screen test. Despite the government giving more than €40m to the film industry, Irish movies took only €5m from the country’s €104m box-office bonanza.

The year would have been a complete write-off were it not for an English director. Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley grossed €3.7m from Irish customers. That put it on a par with Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Casino Royale, the James Bond movie.

This left other Irish productions sharing a miserable €1.3m, barely enough to cover the salary of a midprice Hollywood agent.

During the same period the government provided €13m in funding for projects through the Irish Film Board, on top of the €28m in tax write-offs under its section 481 incentive.

Preliminary figures show that almost €85m was invested under the tax scheme in 2006, with 2,722 claims made at a cost to the exchequer of €28.5m, nearly double the amount written off in 2005.

Loach’s production aside, only one other Irish release managed to make it into the top 100. Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s novel Breakfast on Pluto, starring Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy as a transvestite, took €939,194 at Irish cinemas, ranking it the 30th most popular film according to figures compiled by Carlton Screen Advertising.

Cinema audiences put the boot in to Studs, another project starring Gleeson. The adaptation of Paul Mercier’s play about a football team of no-hopers who become cup winners took just €165,811.

John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail was also given the thumbs down. Released on November 10, it grossed less than €150,000. The Front Line, about an African security guard who turns the tables on a gang of Dublin criminals when they force him to be the inside man on a bank robbery, earned €77,608 from its release across 30 screens.

Isolation, a horror film set on a farm, made €33,792 from 22 screens, while Middletown, which starred Matthew Macfadyen, was shown in only four cinemas and generated €14,800.

About 75% of the box-office take goes to the cinema. The remaining 25% goes to the distributor to cover its costs along with a commission fee. Anything left over goes to the financiers. A film needs to make about €500,000 at the Irish box office before its producers get to see a cent.

In 2001 the Department of Arts set a target rate of 25% for future recoupment of loans by the Irish Film Board after several years of disappointing returns.

Despite the overall performance last year, the industry is putting a brave face on the outcome. James Morris, the board’s chairman, said Irish features were invariably competing against the strong presence of Hollywood movies in the marketplace.

“The 5% at the box office is quite a good performance and we hope to build on that,” he said. “To have most of that 5% generated by one or two films would not be unusual. That’s the nature of being in a business where only one in 10 films is a hit.

“You can’t expect all your feature films to have mass appeal, but they may have other virtues and score on other scales of measure. You are bringing new film-makers into the marketplace and ideas that may catch on, and there is the cultural dimension. Nobody in the film business expects all the films to be (a hit).”

Last year was more successful for the Irish film industry than 2005 though, when films including Tara Road, Pavee Lackeen and Boy Eats Girl took only €1,021,011 at the box office.

“The film board is not an investment bank; we are a development organisation that sees funds as being about building a long-term, viable, sustainable, indigenous film industry,” said Morris.

“Real progress is being made, but inevitably it’s a long game. We have some very good films coming through this year. It takes between one and two years to bring a film into production, so most of the work we have been doing in the past 18 months will be coming through this year and in the years ahead.”

Among the movies the board has in the pipeline is Once, starring Glen Hansard, which has been selected for the Sundance Film Festival. Paddy Breathnach, the director of Man About Dog and I Went Down, returns with Shrooms, about a group of American teens who go camping in Ireland in search of magic mushrooms. Pat Shortt and Anne-Marie Duff will star in Garage, a follow-up film from Adam & Paul director Lenny Abrahamson.

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