Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Minister and her colleagues in the Department on an extraordinarily successful Rising anniversary programme. My knowledge of its success comes through experiencing the programme locally in County Galway. The event in Athenry was of an extraordinarily high standard. Given the quality of the production and the performances, it was a world-class event that could have been taken on tour the following day to a number of locations across the globe and it would have represented Ireland in an exceptionally positive light in terms of our artistic and cultural heritage.

I also commend the Minister on the work she just described on securing the future of our cinema in Galway. The artistic community in Galway has identified the serious dearth of performance facilities in the town on a number of occasions. Galway city and county have now secured the European Capital of Culture 2020. I commend the Minister on using the final €1 million to safeguard the cinema. A significant investment had already been made in the building.

I have a final observation. The success of the 1916-2016 programme trickled all the way down to tiny villages and towns across this country and leveraged a huge amount of community endeavour. That is an extraordinarily powerful example of what can happen when there is a bottom-up approach to nurturing cultural and artistic endeavour in a country. My recent experience of Culture Night on 16 September brought that home to me. When we support our towns and villages across the country - beyond the traditional flagship events such as Galway Arts Festival, Spraoi and Dublin Theatre Festival - by reaching out and giving a helping hand to small communities, they can perform with some exceptionally powerful events.

With regard to the overall policy of the Department and how it intends to support artistic endeavour in the future, is a change of heart likely in terms of supporting that type of endeavour from the bottom up? Culture Night is one event, one night during the year, and it is extraordinarily successful. The programme of events across County Galway took up two pages in our local provincial newspaper and more communities are coming on board every year. Events such as the Shorelines Arts Festival in Portumna are supported by the Arts Council. My assessment of how this works is that it must be a large and accomplished event, with a similar group of people behind the event, before it begins to feature on the radar of the Arts Council and the Department nationally. Is there a way to devolve more power and funds to the local authorities, which have considerable expertise in this area, to reach out and begin the nurturing of the arts and the enriching of people's lives, as Deputy Ó Cuív eloquently described it? Can we devolve more power and funding to the local authorities, which I believe are doing an exceptional job in this regard?