Ms Orlaith McBride:

I will take the questions in reverse order. The turnaround for applications depends on the type of application. We can turn the small applications around relatively quickly but the big ones for significant sums of money as part of our annual funding take approximately 16 weeks from the date of receipt of the application, which would normally be in September, until the decision is made and communicated in December.

We have procured a company, Coyne Consulting, which has conducted the first open survey of organisations and artists that have either received or not received, applied or had difficulty applying for, Arts Council funding to ensure that we do not just ask people who have been in receipt of funding what they think of the Arts Council, the service, the experience etc. We were invited to speak on governance and we presented that in the strictest sense of the word but if the committee wants to talk about the kinds of organisation and the experiences we have funded in recent years, we have made participatory arts a priority. They are arts activities happening in different communities and locations, for example, we invested a large sum of money in Arts & Disability Ireland in recent years. It has transformed the capacity of people with disabilities to access the arts and to make extraordinary art. This year, and in recent years, we have prioritised funding for children and young people. This year, as part of our new strategic funding programme, we have increased funding from 15 organisations annually to 30. They work with children and young people, in areas of disadvantage and rural communities doing youth theatre and dance. We are also going to launch the Creative Schools programme in the coming weeks, which will reach into 150 schools around the country in 2018. We have identified schools that participate in the delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, scheme, as well as in rural, urban and Irish language communities and so on. We are beginning to ensure we are reaching out as far as we can within the available resources. Between 70% and 80% on the Arts Council's internal resource is spent on funding. That is too much but we lost one third of our staff and are only now building the staff up to ensure we can spend more than 20% or 30% of our time thinking and imagining how we develop and support artists and arts organisations for the next ten years in Ireland.