Ms Jo Mangan:

Regarding Leader, we have had that on our wish list for a long time. As we know, Leader funds are a great community resource but cultural organisations have had difficulty accessing that money. For example, it took me five years to convince my local Leader group in County Kildare that it was within Leader's mandate to fund cultural activity. The new Leader guidelines have been published but I have not read them all, so I am unsure as to whether this point is sufficiently embedded so that those of us working in the cultural sector know that it is there and accessible. The Leader organisations must work to understand the potential of cultural industries, for example, county festivals and artists. I attended the launch of the Western Development Commission, WDC, report in Ballaghaderreen. It was fascinating. Professor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Ms Garry Hynes - extraordinary people and talismans for our sector - spoke.

The enterprise board did something interesting that was picked up on in the press recently. It sent Macnas, which members will know, from Galway to South by Southwest, SXSW, to promote Ireland as an investment destination. There has been a slight shift in thinking, although we must be careful that it does not become too deeply instrumentalised. Perhaps we should consider how other agencies funded by the Government or Europe can look to the arts as a way of promoting Ireland internationally without being too instrumental.

We are in constant danger as regards local authorities because a certain percentage of money for the arts comes via them as discretionary funding. It can disappear at any moment. The National Campaign for the Arts is calling for that funding to be made non-discretionary and moved into local authorities' central funding.