Ms Angela Dorgan:

Good afternoon. The NCFA is a voluntary organisation. We have more than 25,000 individual members and our membership includes 84 resource organisations which, combined, work with more than 100,000 artists nationally, across all arts disciplines. The theatre, film, dance, music, festivals and events programmed by our members and the arts sector in Ireland are attended in larger numbers in Ireland than in the UK or Northern Ireland, and in larger numbers than the GAA championship games. The NCFA believes that if the Government truly values our culture, our arts and our artists then the course of action should be straightforward. The aims of the action would be: to get Ireland off the bottom of the arts and culture investment league in Europe by committing to an investment of 0.3% of GDP over the lifetime of this Government, which would take us halfway to the European average; to improve working and living conditions for Irish artists; to put arts at the heart of education, public policy and economic thinking through cross-cutting policy initiatives; to provide a conducive environment for public engagement in arts at all levels in order to foster inclusivity and access; and more Government thinking on STEM, the science, technology, engineering and maths arena, which should become STEAM, including an A for "arts".

The NCFA collects and disseminates our message and its implementation through weekly update meetings and though our network of constituency groups all over the country. We invite all members of this committee, and indeed all elected representatives, to use the NCFA as a resource and to lean on us.