Professor Brian Singleton:

The question was essentially about bringing people together. We have been trying to do that in the past 18 months. My university has been trying to match artists with people in the sciences.

We have just developed a project between a music composer and a social scientist who had conducted research about the secrets surrounding pregnancy. The first output of this was a musical installation. It was on the radio. There was a whole page in The Irish Timesabout it. On the strength of that, the composer has had three more commissions internationally rather than nationally. She would not have moved in that direction if we had not matched them together. It was done quite organically. We currently have an actor working in the school of nursing to develop apps for people with long-term illnesses who need coping strategies. There is a great deal of work for people in other industries, as well as in the pure arts disciplines.

The Arts Council currently funds the arts in a very discrete way by discipline. There is a drama panel, for example. There are panels for each discipline. Increasingly - certainly in the past ten years - very few of my graduates are working solely within one discipline. They are cutting across disciplines. The disciplines themselves are merging. We need to review all of that. We cannot train people now for one industry alone. They need to have multiple skills.