Mr. Philip King:

Gabhaim buíochas don Chathaoirleach agus don choiste. Is onóir domsa a bheith anseo os comhair an choiste inniu.

Looking at the pictures coming from the Mansion House on 21 January, 100 years on, it is a prescient time. The reference that the Taoiseach and many other speakers, including the President, made to the Democratic Programme was indeed a reminder of the time when the State was founded. I must say, 100 years on we in the world of arts and creativity find ourselves in a very difficult place. I concur absolutely with everything Ms Hynes has said and the numbers she mentioned. I will not rehearse that again here.

The arts matter for at least four sets of reasons. First, because creativity, culture and the arts are essential to our well-being and valuable in their own right as uniquely irreplaceable human activities. Second, they matter for the individual and personal benefits they confer by enabling us to imagine, invent, interpret and communicate diverse ways of seeing the world. Third, they matter for the communal and societal value and diversity they create, promote and share and fourth, they matter for the value they add to our reputation globally and for their potential to strengthen Ireland’s role in bilateral relationships by enriching common ground. Sir John Tusa, former director of the Barbican in London and executive at the BBC, puts it like this:

The arts matter because they embrace, express and define the soul of a civilisation. A nation without arts would be a nation that had stopped talking to itself, stopped dreaming, and had lost interest in the past and lacked curiosity about the future.

When I was on the Arts Council a new report about the value of the arts would often arrive from Indecon. We would look at the executive summary of that report. The beginning of the report would always say that for every euro invested in the arts, a return of X would be generated. We would hotfoot over to the Department of Finance with the new report, run up the stairs and say we have it now. The officials in the Department would look benignly at the report and thank us for bringing it to their attention, and nothing would happen.

As I was saying a little earlier, I attended the funeral of the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin. He and I worked together a lot over the years. One day we were chatting about the value of the arts and why they matter. We were talking about numbers, and he said to me that there is no metric for the priceless. Many years ago I wrote that down. How true is it? I ask the committee to imagine something. If one looks at the depictions of Irish people as they left here in their hundreds of thousands after the Famine, one might say they are not carrying any worldly goods. They do not have anything of value with them. If one was being unkind, one might say these people are fairly worthless. However, when they arrived in their destinations, particularly in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, the great cities on the eastern seaboard of the United States, as well as Chicago, and they unpacked their emotional baggage, something of rare and powerful value became apparent. I wish to read into the record a poem written by the Donegal poet Moya Cannon. It is called "Carrying the Songs". She writes:

It was always those with little else to carry

who carried the songs

to Babylon,

to the Mississippi —

some of these last possessed less than nothing

did not own their own bodies

yet, three centuries later,

deep rhythms from Africa,

stowed in their hearts, their bones,

carry the world’s songs.

For those who left my county,

girls from Downings and the Rosses

who followed herring boats north to Shetland

gutting the sea’s silver as they went

or boys from Ranafast who took the Derry boat,

who slept over a rope in a bothy,

songs were their souls’ currency

the pure metal of their hearts,

to be exchanged for other gold,

other songs which rang out true and bright

when flung down

upon the deal boards of their days.

It is exquisitely poignant, but what it tells us is that when those migrants - and they were migrants - left here, they carried in their heads, their hands and their feet the emotional baggage of a whole country. When they unpacked it and the Irish songwriters in Tin Pan Alley met people like Irving Berlin, the Irish and the Jews formed the music business. I emphasise "music business". Victor Herbert founded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, ASCAP, the first collection agency for collecting copyrights on songs. Not only that, we left an indelible thumbprint on the making of the great American songbook with which America colonised the world. When I turned on my radio as a 1950s boy in Cork city, I watched the radio heat up, caught the smell of the valves and heard rock and roll coming from the American Forces Network based in Germany. I was turned on. I bought a pair of jeans and a harmonica. I bought into the thing, because where culture goes, commerce follows.

We are beginning to realise that here, little by little. The granular, metric argument does not wash because we are dealing with something priceless. Ms Hynes alluded to it as well. We are in a world that has become a little bit more virtual, augmented and artificial. However, we have something in our bag of imagination that enables us to be tactile, human and engaging in a way that is a very powerful antidote to what I call "the digitally lonely life"; a screen-dominated life. We have that in spades in this country. When Members of the Oireachtas talk to Intel and people in DCU, they are beginning to talk about science technology, engineering and maths, STEM, and STEAM. With the insertion of the A of arts into that acronym, we are looking at something very powerful.

Two things are absolutely true. The arts and what they can deliver are absolutely central to this proposition. I emphasises that anything that cannot be automated is going to become very valuable. Second, we have reached a century of independence, and independence by my definition is paying our way in the world in an independent way. If we do not create the conditions where we grow, own and monetise our own intellectual property, we will never have a real wealth proposition that will address health, housing, education etc. It is the resource that Ms Hynes refers to, the naturally occurring resource of imagination, that gives us the song, the poem, the film and the Oscar award, and designs the chip that goes into the Intel box. It is the same thing.

These powerful elements of engagement and empathy are a sine qua nonto a civilised, independent society.

I will conclude by reiterating what Ms Hynes said. It is shameful that we do not look at this resource and treat it with respect.