Vol. 554 No. 5
158 Mr. Stanton asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment her views on the suggestion in the recent Forfás report on e-commerce that the Government should promote the establishment of a national college of multimedia; the Government's plans in this regard; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [17098/02]
The Forfás "Report on E-Commerce – The Policy Requirements" of July 1999 recommended the establish ment of a higher level national college of multimedia. Government responded directly in December 1999 in announcing a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish MediaLabsEurope, MLE, to develop a multi media village around the MLE campus and to establish Digital Media Development Ltd, DMD Ltd., to oversee the implementation of the projects.
MediaLabsEurope commenced operations as a third level research and educational facility in the digital multimedia field in July 2000. There is now a top class research team in place comprising 40 Irish, European and US full-time researchers and 20 postgraduate researchers. Ongoing research is spread over a wide range of digital multimedia fields and issues.
The digital hub and MLE are important elements of long-term strategy both to develop national R&D capacity and a key focus for digital media based projects in this country. All indications are that the development of capabilities in this sector will be of particular importance. Data recently prepared for Forfás indicate that the global digital media market was worth at least $178 billion in 2001 and is now set to grow about 29% a year to be worth at least $434 billion by 2006.
