Mr. Mathew Horsman:

May I say one thing about cost that is important and inescapable? It is very expensive to run an orchestra and to take it on the road. Looking at the period we looked at, 2007 to 2016, the number of regional performances outside of Dublin by the NSO was 11 in 2007 and just three in 2016. There were 20 educational performances in 2007 and just 13 in 2016. This was because of the constant need to find cuts. The easiest thing to do is to stop travelling and to stay in one place. It was not the best outcome culturally or artistically but it was a necessity financially.

I will make a final point. We felt - Helen Boaden and Mediatique felt - very strongly that it was incumbent upon us to consider how to get to the point of funding certainty and to be realistic in what we said. We therefore thought realistically about the commercial revenues that were possible. In our modelling, worked on by my colleague George Smith behind me, we worked through what the commercial revenues might be, and in our assumptions they are higher than they have been, so we assume that with better functioning of and more excitement about the two fully staffed orchestras, they could make more money. There is a limit to this, however. This is how we focused on the amount of the gap. I refer to the XYZ calculation: X from broadcast fees from RTÉ, Y from the commercial world and Z from the gap, which would be a direct grant of some kind. We felt we had to do it properly because no country, even the most laissez-faire, runs an orchestral classical music service or segment without public money.