Ms Garry Hynes:

Go raibh maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. What do the arts mean to me? Inherent in this question is the flawed thinking we tend to fall into when discussing the arts. This is not to denigrate the opportunity to articulate my view or the passion with which I will attempt to communicate it to the committee. The problem is that the question suggests that there is an abstract entity in society called the arts which has greater or lesser degrees of meaning to different individuals. This is simply not true. Instead, I believe creativity is fundamental to every human being and that we are all creative beings at each and every moment of our lives, irrespective of background, education or the communities in which we live.

Fundamental to all human activity is the capacity to imagine. If there are some, like me, who become professional artists - I earn my living by using my imagination to collaborate with others in the making of professional theatre - I am only distinguished from the person who uses to his or her imagination to watch that theatre by who pays our paycheck at the end of the week. I always think of myself as an accidental artist. Nothing in my background suggests the life I was destined to live. Born in Ballaghdereen in the hungry 1950s, the daughter of an exceptional teacher father and an open-minded, supportive mother, I was privileged enough to expect an education at least to my late teenage years and, if I was fortunate, a university education. This gave me the greatest gift of all, time to explore who I might become. In the usual act of teenage rebellion, I spent most of those years actively pursuing a life outside Ireland. It was only through those early clumsy forays into putting on plays that I discovered how to be Irish and that the plays of an Irishman born almost 100 years before me, John Millington Synge, spoke more to my heart and sense of self than all the American plays by my contemporaries. In those formative years I was doing what we all must do to live meaningful lives - I was becoming part of a community.

What is profoundly terrifying to me now is how carelessly and stupidly we are allowing ourselves to become isolated from one another, broken into blocks of entitlement and self-interest that ruthlessly disregard our need for the common good. For me, the fire and definition in my life and the lives of all others is the act of imagining, but that imagining, which is the practising of art however instinctive its origins and whether it is in performance, singing, painting, making film or making music, always needs to be protected and nourished. It requires the making of structures to enable it, to facilitate participation in it by all and to create the circumstances whereby makers can live decent and respected lives.

On that point, I wish to outline some stark facts for the committee. They were recently published by Theatre Forum Ireland, the forum responsible for theatre performances. One third of all performers in Ireland earn less than the minimum wage and four fifths of the jobs in our sector, the performing arts, are deemed to be precarious. Some 74% of actors rely on other income and 73% of organisations that make and produce theatre do not make employment or health contributions to their members. This is shocking and if it applied to any other industry in the country all of us would hang our heads in shame. Instead, it is tolerated. It is not acceptable in Irish society today that Irish actors earn less than the living wage. It is also not acceptable that one of our major national institutions is apparently so lacking in governance that fundamental disagreements as to its role and function in Irish life remain chronically unresolved.

Members of the Joint Committee on Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht should note this and many other examples of our failure to protect our culture are not acceptable. I will finish with what I believe are prescient words from the final commencement address of Dr. Joseph W. Polisi to his students at the Juilliard School, a major school for the arts in New York, on his retirement, who stated: “Rather than being a subject of pious platitudes, the arts must be viewed as an essential part of our existence which can be easily neutralized by an uncaring populace or an insensitive political leadership." This is a warning we would all do well to heed.