Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will ask a few questions. I have visited Sherkin Island and know it well. It is a beautiful island. There is no better experience than being on an island. People constantly speak of the need for connectivity but sometimes we also need to disconnect and there is no better place to achieve disconnection than on an island. Members have asked many of the questions I intended asking. One of the points underlined, however, was that we do not need to locate all third level education in Dublin or the other big cities. Thousands of people are moving from counties around the country into the big towns and cities where they are encountering serious problems such as the accommodation crisis. Something like an outreach campus in different parts of the country could allow students to remain in their locality and facilitate the cross-pollination of their ideas. These could eventually develop for the counties in question, rather than having everything located into Dublin.

On the arts and older people, somewhere along the line we have inverted our value system in regard to older people. We talk about being a more inclusive society but in many ways we fracture people from general society. One of the points made, and it is a line I like, was that we are one community. That is an important part of policy development in that the more integrated we are, the stronger and better we will be at all levels. What has been the reception among older people for the services and the arts the organisations are delivering?

Mr. Naughton's point about a woman who read a book by Shakespeare but only consumed the play 17 years later was amazing. It was not something that I had thought about previously. Mr. Naughton also referred to large drop in the number of audio described performances. Perhaps he could talk us through why that has happened and what steps are needed to reverse this decline.

I have one question for all of the witnesses. The stable funding model is key because all those with whom I work who receive State funding find that continually chasing this funding exhausts a good chunk of their resources. The Government and Departments hate multi-annual funding because budgets change and the idea of committing to the future presents a challenge for them. What is the best way to address this issue with the Departments?

My final question is one that people do not like to discuss in these types of forums. The Departments that fund the work of the witnesses' organisations measure them in certain ways. In what ways are they measuring outputs and in what ways should they measure them? I ask the witnesses to deal with those questions.