Dr. Tara Byrne:

I can answer questions afterwards on the images. We believe creativity is a lifelong journey, and the life course of people engaging in the arts and creativity is key.

I will make some points on aging and the arts, which might be new to some committee members but certainly will not be new to others who are here. I do not need to go over the figures. We all know that Ireland, as a western country, is getting older and by 2040 approximately one in four of us will be 65 and over.

That is something the State is considering well in advance. It is positive that we are living longer and healthier lives. It should not be seen in a negative light, which is something we are used to from some media coverage. It means people continue to be engaged and have more time to be engaged in different activities. They demand rich and meaningful engagement. As a State, we must take care of that, which is what we are doing with the festival.

There is a demand for the festival and we see that every day it runs. We see it in what is said to us after people have been to an event and we see it in the audience surveys we carry out every single year. We see it in the evaluation we do every single year. We have 100,000 people who come to our festival from every county in Ireland. We see it also in the emails we get from all over the world from people who say they do not have a festival like this. They tell us the work is amazing and ask what they can do. We also have people from across the world who come to our festival. I met five people from Japan, Canada, the UK and Germany who came specifically for the festival this year. There is definitely a demand. In 2017, Age UK carried out wellbeing research which surveyed 100,000 older people in the UK. The No. 1 factor contributing to their wellbeing was access to creativity. That was ahead of financial security and health, which was pretty meaningful.

Regarding aging and the arts, I mentioned earlier that there are many benefits to all art activity. The reason we get involved in the arts are the personal benefits first and foremost. They provide the intrinsic value and are about how we create a sense of identity for ourselves and meaning throughout the arts. That is incredibly important as we get older. It is there throughout our life course but as we get older, there is sometimes a suggestion that one's self identify has stopped somewhere along the way. That is simply not true. We continue to create and recreate our sense of self and the festival focuses on that. Selfhood is key to it. From those personal benefits, however, come societal and State benefits. I mentioned the social connection that comes from attending the festival and meeting one's friends there. We also run an audience network where we put together older people who want to come to the festival and to arts events in general. We co-ordinate those events around the country and actively put people together.

If one wants to look at it from a public policy perspective rather than simply from a consideration of the personal benefits, the confidence and connections which emerge from the festival obviously contribute to social cohesion. Our Sherkin Island friends here outlined the importance of that. We see it also in the Bealtaine festival. There are also physical benefits which are sometimes harder for people to see. Research has proven that there are cognitive benefits from a focused and deep engagement in arts activities. Those things are crucial for older people. It is very important for the State to take that into account along with the sense of wellbeing which is at the centre of the festival.

To say a little about the festival itself, it is produced by Age and Opportunity Ireland, which is a national organisation that promotes wellbeing and quality of life in older age through education, sport and culture, which is where we come in. We are funded through the Arts Council and the Health Service Executive and we are all about partnerships. The festival takes place every single day of every May of every year. We cannot do it without the partnerships we have in each and every county. We are extremely community connected. We have a network of thousands of organisations and events every year. This was founded in the 1990s in response to a need and we have a long pedigree now. A founder member, Ms Helen O'Donoghue, curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is with me here. The identified need was the need for access to the arts and creativity at all ages and, in particular perhaps, as we get older and have a bit more time to get back to things we did not have time for when we were working. That is when one is not working in the arts, of course.

The festival is about access first, but also about representation. We need to be able to see ourselves in the world around us to have that sense of selfhood. As one gets older, some people, albeit not all, can feel more invisible. The arts provides a very public way for people to see themselves mirrored in the world around them. We try to tell the stories of all of us as we get older and we try to hold ourselves up very publicly to the world through the arts with the festival. It is about visibility and representation. It is about showing the individual's spirit, no matter what one's age. One can be 80 and just as feisty and different an individual as a 20 year old. One of the things that happens as one gets older is that one is homogenised into a ghettoised block as if one is part of a special interest group. It is as if one loses a sense of self and is somehow amorphous. As all of us who are getting older know, it does not work like that. The framework for all of this is a celebration of the contribution of older people in Irish public life and the arts. It is really about celebrating the contribution of age.

In a policy context, we feel we could do a bit better. Obviously, we fit into broad Government policies, some of which are set out in the documents before the members. Those policies are very much about older people staying active and sometimes creativity is tagged on. We fit into arts policies most specifically. Most recently, one pillar of Creative Ireland is creative communities which is about enabling every community to be creative. As the festival takes place all over the country, we believe we very much fulfil that policy objective. We are also part of Making Great Art Work, which is the Arts Council's policy document, but we are implied rather than listed. Young people are very much part of that document. Our view is that the policy needs to take account of the life course of all of us. In the same way that young people are very important, and I do not take away from that for a minute, older people could be recognised explicitly rather than implicitly in a policy context. There is also, of course, Culture 2025.

I will leave the committee with a couple of recommendations. We meet a strong need. The arts have a very particular role to play in older life in relation to identity, meaning, activity and health. Because of those social and personal benefits, we feel we address an equity issue. If I were to leave the members with one thing, it would be the need to look at the life course of people engaging in the arts in relation to policy.