Mr. Brian Rowntree:

In response to the Chair's question, we all have a duty of care. There are many activities that we do not promote effectively. We do not offer the invitation effectively to people to participate and we do not seek the audience. We expect the audience and we have to be smarter about seeking it. If someone goes to those people, knocks on their door, makes contact and asks if they would like to participate, I guarantee that most of them will say "Yes". That is because someone has taken the time to visit them. They will come then. There is life and there has to be life beyond city boundaries. If we do not have that, we will kill rural Ireland. It is that simple.

We have a demographic timebomb and it is ticking. We have to consider how to address the impact of that timebomb in respect of urban versus rural. If we concentrate all our services and activities in urban areas, the impact will be more isolation in rural communities. Communities will not die, not people, because let us face it, when we talk about communities dying, we also mean people will die. We have to prevent that. We have to make interventions which are structured and the arts are critical to that success.

The Chair also asked about indicators of success. We have to move away from expenditure driven indicators to performance and outcome driven indicators. The Government has to be smarter about the questions it asks in respect of what is brought to the table. Turning to the big process, all the organisations here, and others, have to be given the opportunity in the bidding process to state what outcomes they will deliver in return for the expenditure they seek. They must then be held to account for those outcomes. That is a smarter way to do business. If we are to drive the arts into a business environment, then we have to encourage arts organisations to think of themselves as businesses. We have to let them tell us their story and measure them against the outcomes that business would expect to be held against. This is not about allocating funds and just seeking an expenditure trail. We have to go way beyond that. If we have these focused outcomes, the Government, in its summary report, will have a great news story to tell the public.