Ms Orlaith McBride:

Two of the questions are inter-related because the question on data collection and illustrating the benefit to the taxpayer are linked into our advocacy. I will deal with the advocacy piece first. Over the past number of years, the Arts Council has been in crisis management. There has been a significant collapse in funding, so we have not been as active in the area of promotion or advocacy as we should have been. As our money was reduced, we wanted to ensure that as much money as possible was leaving the building. What the report clearly identified and what our strategy identified, in terms of objective 20, was that the Arts Council needed to become much more active in the area of promotion and advocacy. I have just come from a session at the Royal Hibernian Academy where there was a call from the sector that the Arts Council needed to lead that public discourse in terms of the value of the arts, making a case for the arts and demonstrating the impact of the arts. We do not currently have the resources to do such work, and I am not just talking just about financial resources. We do not have the inhouse expertise to do that. In the past two years, we have established a strategic development department. The Government would not have been able to conduct a review of the Arts Council prior to the establishment of the strategic development department because we did not have the capacity to generate the evidence that Professor O'Hagan and Ms Mahony required to even begin a value for money review. The Arts Council has been deficient in terms of its internal capacity to look at the whole area of promotion and advocacy and measurement of the impact of the public investment in the Arts Council and the investment and return in terms of arts organisations and artists. We have committed to this in the strategy. The sector is very conscious that for us to invest in advocacy and promotion, we will need to divert resources in the short-term so that in the long-term, it will, hopefully, release additional public resources into the Arts Council. We are playing the long game but we need to upskill ourselves. I do not believe we have the internal capacity currently to attend to this area. We have strategic partnerships with the Irish Research Council. We already work with the ESRI and are looking at the Growing Up in Ireland survey. We are developing a partnership where we will take the evidence from this longitudinal survey to see how we can use that to better effect in terms of the impact of arts and culture on the lives of children and young people. We have started this work but we are playing the long game.

In terms of other arts councils, there is evidence that there is an absence of any international set of indicators. Next week I will meet my colleagues in the International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies, IFACCA, to look at how best we can, as arts councils around the world, begin to develop a set of indicators that are arts led rather than rely on other aspects of public policy-making.

On the question on partnerships with bodies that have the skills, we are the Arts Council and not a research council. Therefore, we need to look at how we can employ research methodologies through people who have expertise in this area and bring those skills into the Arts Council. We must do better in advocacy and promotion but in order to do better in the long term, we need to invest more resources in the short term. Over the past number of years, we have not wanted to spend as much money internally on ourselves because we wanted to protect as much as we could in terms of the external environment for artists and arts organisations. I will hand over to Mr. Ó Coigligh to respond to the other questions.