Mr. Paul Fahy:

The festival presents international work across all of the art forms in addition to Irish work. We also shifted towards becoming a producer-led festival in 2011. Since then we have produced 14 productions of original work which were made for Galway and toured around the world. That was between 2011 and 2017. Since then we have toured extensively with these works, alongside our co-producers, in the UK, the USA, Europe and Australia on multiple occasions. Those shows have received more than 34 nominations for theatre awards and have won 14 national and international awards. In 2017 alone, in addition to the festival, we also toured for 16 weeks in Ireland and internationally.

Our discussion platform, which Mr. Crumlish mentioned, First Thought Talks, was established in 2012. Since then we have hosted 94 events featuring hundreds of high-profile panellists with an ever-increasing audience. The aim of the festival discussion platform is to present the very best in discussion on forward-thinking ideas across a broad range of topics. First Thought Talks is also becoming an entity in its own right. We have presented internationally in New York. The first independent First Thought Talks platform will happen in October of this year at NUI Galway.

All of that garners a huge amount of media coverage for us. This year alone we have had more than five articles in The New York Times. The committee members can see some quotes in the submission. The Guardianlast year rated us as "One of the Top 5 Summer Festivals in Europe". The Irish Timescalled us: "The biggest, most exciting, most imaginative explosion of arts activity this country has." The BBC referred to us as "One of Europe's most important cultural events". All of this also brings communities together, including both audiences and artists. The members can see from the breakdown of the statistics that 63% of our audiences are domestic, with a large number, 45%, coming from Galway. The 37% of audiences made up of overseas visitors has a very great economic impact, as Mr. Crumlish has said. The breakdown of the gender of our attendees is that 55% are female are 45% are male.

The 2018 festival is nearly upon us, beginning in ten days. It is the biggest ever festival for us and the biggest music programme we have ever undertaken. We have six festival world premieres and five Irish premieres. We are introducing the new idea of a festival garden in Eyre Square as a central hub for the festival. We have an expanded free programme. Some 25% of the festival's programme is offered free of charge to audiences. We have also presented Enda Walsh +GIAF in New York this year. We have also increased our festival programme of First Thought Talks, which will run during the middle weekend of the festival. Our aim is to deliver the very best experience to as wide an audience as possible and to bring audiences and artists together.