Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I, too, must apologise that I was not here but this place has a lot of things going on at the one time at the moment. It is the last two weeks of the term. One of the challenges of the arts in the modern world is that they are seen in a compartment. We live in a very compartmentalised world and the arts are seen as being there for certain people. One thing that we have to recognise is that for social and mental well-being, arts and culture have been part of human existence since the beginning of time and all societies had arts and culture. It is very interesting when societies that might not be as developed as ours in our perception are looked at to find how central cultural issues are to people. Therefore, the arts, which tend to be a bit of an add-on in government, are central to human existence.

The other thing that used to amuse me a little bit was that I would be sent abroad by the Government on various missions on St. Patrick's Day and so on, and as part of those I was always asked to do events for Enterprise Ireland and the Industrial Development Authority, IDA. It was interesting to see how, on all of those fronts, the arts and culture were the way we identified ourselves. They were our unique identifier for very much more mundane economic reasons. Similarly, when I travelled abroad as the Minister accompanying the President, I saw again how we used our arts and culture to identify ourselves as a separate people and who we are. We should recognise the arts, and it is important for us in the Oireachtas not to see arts and culture as an add-on but as something central to human well-being, not only economic well-being but well-being in and of itself. They also have a huge economic impact for this country.

This has been a long session so I will cut to the chase. I used to be a co-op manager and I would get a lot of praise in that job, but it was money I was looking for. I would come back to the office and we always had the bank manager roaring at us. We were trying to jiggle the cheques around and I would say to my assistant that it was an awful pity that praise was not bankable. The bank manager would not recognise that currency, however, and he kept looking for the actual notes. If we can be a little bit mundane, would I be right in thinking that the witnesses' shopping list would be for more funding, multi-annual funding to be able to plan three to five years ahead, and that some of the red tape would be dealt with? Red tape is part of the modern world, we all know that. It is not going to disappear but some simple things could be done. We could do a lot more by making simple programmes on computers to get rid of some of the record-keeping that goes on. I understand that we will all be paying our PAYE and PRSI on the computer every week so there will be no more P35s, which will be a great relief for any of the witnesses who have a wage to pay and have to do all of those mundane jobs. I know that as artists they find those tiring, but at the end of the day, the manager part of them has to do all of those things.

One thing about the Garda vetting I can never get my head around is that if somebody works for three arts organisations and drives two school busses, they need five Garda clearances in the one year. One would think that with modern bureaucracy, a number would be assigned to somebody's clearance, and if there was any doubt or if something happened between the day the clearance was given on 1 January 2018 and the day that the witnesses wanted to hire the person, the witnesses would be able to give the Garda the number, they would have the same number in the computer, and down the line that person would have clearance and would remain cleared, end of story. With tax clearance and everything else, people get it, they have it and it is given in.

Garda clearance is one thing that really causes delays. There are logjams throughout the year and people get held up with something with which there is no problem in 99% of the cases and it would be fairly well known there was no problem because the person would have had clearance with the previous employer. It is an issue we should face up to in this House and not accept the arguments that we have been given for years that there is some reason, because that reason has never been made rationally to me as to why it cannot be done and why there cannot be a simpler system. When it is looked at logically, if Garda clearance is applied for somebody and within the same year Garda clearance is needed again for the same person, if something is known, surely it should affect the first Garda clearance anyway and it should be rescinded.

Over the years I have sometimes thought I had a great idea and somebody explained to me why it could not be that way, but no one has ever given me an explanation as to why we cannot deal with that one issue that holds up so many activities that depend on human input, particularly those where people work with vulnerable people and children. We need to deal with that. It would be interesting to find out from the witnesses, because I know they are down as working with artists and so on, what other bureaucratic nightmares they face that take an inordinate amount of time when what it is being sought for has a positive benefit. I know this is very mundane stuff but the idea of focusing on that is to get them away from unnecessary mundane stuff and allow them get back to the real business of running the shows and festivals and all of the other things they want to run. I would say that all of us feel that burden of reportage every year.

The other thing we have to do is deal with reports. There has to be accountability but we have to decide whether we are sending in a lot of reports that nobody ever reads and just filling files and covering backs, with these files getting thicker and thicker, running to 500 or 1,000 pages and we are just filling up the word count. I have always had the view that if something was never going to be read, such as strategic plans for the Department that we used to write, there was not much point in having them.

There is a funny side to that. People used to give out about the Official Languages Act 2003 and the need to translate, even though the translation was the cheap part. All of the personal hours involved in thinking about writing a document, going around the houses 15 times and getting everybody's sign off costs a lot of money, whereas a translation just takes one person with a machine, and if it has been done before and it is fairly similar the machine will translate 90% of it. One thing we noticed and one of the real upsides I found was that when they had to translate them, people, especially in Departments, started cutting unnecessary verbiage out of the documents and the documents became much more user-friendly and effective because they had to look at what they had written. I would be interested in finding out what we could do to simplify the witnesses' lives to get them away from unnecessary bureaucracy and back to what they should be doing, namely, running festivals, developing the arts and so on.

As Senator Warfield is back I will explain why Galway city gets a lot more than Galway county, which I think was his question.