Ms Liz Meaney:

The Arts Council does an awful lot of work in this area and it falls into two categories. One is what we call arts participation, where people engage directly in arts practice. It would be supported by many of our organisations. There is an organisation called Create, which facilitates a huge amount of work in this field of practice. There are also organisations such as Waterford Healing Arts, which looks at arts in health care contexts, and Arts & Disability Ireland, which works with artists with disabilities and with people with disabilities in a participative context. There is that element of the work we do and then there is also the work we do on the continuing professional development of artists, professional practicing artists in their work. There are groups such as resource organisations, including Visual Artists Ireland, Dance Ireland and the Irish Writers Centre. These all provide direct supports to support the development of artists. These can be short-term training courses. The Arts Council also has artists' bursaries where people can apply to us for money to develop their practice as artists. It is about that continuum of support across all the arts throughout the country in many different ways.

Currently, we are looking at our whole funding framework. We are looking at the idea of rather than having one-year bursaries, having multi-annual bursaries for artists so that we give them long-term support. For a writer who is engaging on a new project, perhaps a year is not enough. We need to consider that and the way in which we support them. It is that continuous support.

Some of our major organisations, such as the Abbey Theatre, have their own specialist arts and education department which will engage with particular communities of interest, be they young people, people from a particular geographic location or a particular cohort of the population, in their work. It is about ensuring that all the support we provide works across that panoply, across the map of cultural provision within Ireland, whether one is a professional artist or one wishes to engage with the arts directly to have personal meaning.