Ms Sheila Pratschke:

The Senator has raised many issues that interest me. The Arts Council can have a strong advocacy role behind the scenes and in public. At the moment we are in the process of a strategic review and it is already throwing up some interesting possibilities and ideas. That will be completed in the summer, at which point we will take stock and make some hard decisions about changing the way the Arts Council works and the way in which it focuses on different areas.

That links into the notion of measurement. I agree that a different argument must be made about arts and culture in general. I have had a conversation with Bob Collins, the chairman of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, ACNI, and we both felt strongly about this point. Developing ideas and a new language of describing the arts and highlighting their importance for every citizen's life is something we are interested in developing. We have begun to talk about a forum for ideas. I have been in France so members must forgive me for using words like the "intellectual" and the "philosophical" being tied to the "strategic" and the "concrete". This is what we need and I am very interested in this as we move forward.

If I could have a legacy, it would be to wish that at the end of five years Irish people in general talk about the arts, have a feeling of culture being in their lives and have a sense of its importance. It should be a given so that we do not have to argue about it all the time. People should absorb it into every aspect of their lives as something that is their right and their entitlement and that adds so much to the individual's life when they have this opportunity.