Ms Máire Logue:

I will be brief. On funding, applications and so forth, much of the funding is for programming or marketing. That is where it is targeted. There is very little funding for administration costs. We are trying to pay staff, but we are paying them badly. No public funding is made available for administration costs and if something could be done about that matter, it would be great.

One the things we discussed this year for Listowel Writers Week in the context of Garda vetting was whether the public services card, for example, could be utilised in the future and contain information on whether someone had been vetted by the Garda. Certainly, something needs to be done centrally to make it easier for us when it comes to Garda vetting.

Another issue related to funding, post-event reports and so forth is that each of these organisations, like ours, is audited every year. We supply our accounts which are taken away, examined and audited. We are transparent on every penny we spend. The festival is not for profit and everything is put back into it. We are plain people and, as Mr. John Crumlish said, the application forms should be in plain English. Ask us the question and we will answer it. There is no need to have page after page of questions; we will just give the answer. We would welcome that because it would be great. It would be preferable to art forms and having to spend days trying to decipher the form with a dictionary.

With regard to the OPW, as Ms Catherine Moylan said, we have fantastic beautiful spaces in Listowel such as Listowel Castle. There is a beautiful band stand in front of it that we use every year for some of our outdoor events, similar to what Ms Olga Barry mentioned in the case of Kilkenny. However, this year the OPW preferred us not to use it, which is a shame. It is a public space and we hold fantastic events there that attract 100 to 150 people who sit outside in the open air enjoying the sunshine listening to some poetry and music. We would like to work better with the OPW next year in order that it will allow us to use these facilities for events.