Mr. Pádraig Naughton:

I thank the committee on behalf of Arts and Disability Ireland for the invitation to speak to the members. Arts and Disability Ireland is the national development and resource organisation for arts and disability. Our role is to champion the creativity of artists with disabilities and to promote inclusive experiences for audiences with disabilities. Guided by our strategic plan, Leading Change in Arts and Culture 2017-2021, our board, staff, stakeholders and funders, including our principal funder, the Arts Council, Arts and Disability Ireland works nationally through a series of multi-annual partnerships across the arts and cultural environment. In 2017, this has resulted in 18 projects, 17 accessible performances and exhibitions and support for 24 artists in the creation of new work, showcasing, mentoring and training across nine local authorities.

In 2014, Arts and Disability Ireland was invited by the Arts Council to devise and manage a new funding scheme for artists with disabilities in Ireland. Entitled "Arts and Disability Connect", the scheme is now in its fifth year and has supported 47 awards and distributed more than €132,000. The only scheme exclusively open to artists with disabilities, it was designed to serve as an entry point to the broad range of bursaries, project and production awards, commissions and collaborations available through the Arts Council and local authority arts offices. However, we have identified while managing the scheme the need for a separate production award and the creation of new family-friendly work.

In 2006, Arts and Disability Ireland initiated the very first of our access services for audiences with disabilities with audio described performances at the Abbey Theatre and during the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Over the years a small number of venues and festivals have started providing Irish Sign Language, ISL, and, more recently, relaxed performances. Currently, we are the sole provider of audio description and captioning to the arts in Ireland.

Arts & Disability Ireland's audio description and captioning across Ireland peaked in 2014, with 23 and 30 performances, respectively, but declined to nine and seven in 2017. If we compare that to Scotland, last year there were 248 audio described and 68 captioned performances in 2017. A deaf woman told me that her seeing a captioned performance of Romeo and Julietat the Abbey Theatre came 17 years after she had studied the play for her leaving certificate.

A Strategy for Equality, the report of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities, was published in 1996 and identified a network of national venues where audio description, captioning and ISL should be made available but 22 years later, these recommendations have yet to be realised in their entirety and are certainly something collectively we need to revisit. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014 introduced the new public sector duty under section 42 of that legislation. This is an encouraging tool to enable public bodies to embed human rights and equality, including disability. However, the section offers no direct legal remedy for failure to comply. Consequently, we encourage the committee to consider how the public sector duty under the 2014 Act will be realised in the context of an arts and culture environment.

In 2017, Arts & Disability Ireland commissioned the Going Out survey with the aim of understanding how people with disabilities engage with arts and culture in its broadest sense. The largest quantitative audience survey of its type ever undertaken in Ireland, Arts & Disability Ireland reached 523 respondents with the strategic input of the National Disability Authority and over 20 other disability organisations. The research indicates clearly that people with disabilities attend the arts, so it makes good sense to make arts attendance accessible to people with disabilities. This is 643,131 people and 64% want to attend arts events more often. If we made it possible for just half of them to come one more time, bringing a friend or family member with them, the arts and cultural sector stands to earn an additional €7 million.

If I were to use one example to illustrate our vision for the arts, it would be Ignite. This 2013 to 2015 partnership between the Arts Council, Arts & Disability Ireland and local authorities in Mayo, Galway and Cork created three new commissions each worth €60,000, led by internationally recognised artists with disabilities. This culminated with Cork Ignite on Culture Night 2015, Simon McKeown’s 28-minute, large-scale projection that filled the façade of Cork College of Commerce and involved visual artists and musicians with disabilities from across the city. With Ignite, we achieved so much of what is great about the arts, including collaboration, partnership, innovation and spectacle for an audience of 10,000 people. We also illustrated that public investment in arts and disability can create opportunities for people with disabilities to contribute to the arts and cultural life of Ireland at the highest level and cause a city to stop and notice. As one citizen of Cork put it:

I never thought that I’d be sitting down on the banks of the River Lee, in the month of September, on a cool autumn evening, enjoying myself. It was out of this world.

If there is time, Ms Leah Johnston, Arts & Disability Ireland's project manager, who worked on much of the statistical information and research, and I would be happy to take questions at the end.