Ms Tania Banotti:

The Creative Ireland programme head office is not funding artists. We are not a quango. As Mr. Ó Coigligh said, ultimately we give the money to the local authorities.

The Chairman asked about Bliain na Gaeilge. I draw his attention to the submission which states that about one third of our budget goes to the creative communities piece via the local authorities. The local authorities may decide that they wish to do something around the Irish language under Bliain na Gaeilge or they may decide to do something around the arts, heritage or the libraries programme. They may decide to do something I am thinking of that featured in the Irish Independentlast week, which was an initiative in County Kildare where the 500 people who measure the weather every day for Met Éireann are involved in an arts project, so that it brought together environmentalism and the arts. We do not decide whether it is the artist who gets that funding. Ultimately, it is the local authorities and the team that we have that decide what they need in their local community.

Perhaps there has been a misunderstanding. We are not in the business, as the Arts Council is, of funding professional artists. The only exception to that is under the national creativity fund, where certain arts organisations have come to us where they are doing something quite innovative. For example, the Saolta University Health Care Group in Galway wants to develop a project around the arts and health across seven hospitals, which has never been done in Ireland. The amount of funding that the Arts Council has is specifically restricted to the artist's fees, but there is something missing and we are thinking how we could look at the project and get the arts and health to work better together. The best way I can describe our role is that we are more like a lubricant, in the sense that we are bringing different Departments to the table.

I might ask Mr. Eamonn Moran to talk about the new relationship we have with the Arts Council for the Creative Schools initiative because the Chairman's concern is that we are replacing the Arts Council. That is not the case. The Arts Council is our implementing partner for Creative Schools. The Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Department of Education and Skills have given the Arts Council approximately €1 million, all in, for the first pilot project of Creative Schools, recognising the Arts Council's expertise in terms of arts-rich schools. It is the best implementing partner for this. I hope that explains the position. We are not in the business of funding artists. We are in the business of projects that fall between two stools and that at the national level might be funded as pilot projects under the national creativity fund. At local authority level, it is in fact the local culture teams that decide what gets funding.