Mr. Theo Dorgan:

The Minister of State asked an interesting question, not least because it focuses on how we decide to allocate our resources. Local authority spending on the arts has decreased year on year. This year, it is 27% less than it was last year. I am not convinced that local authorities are, with sufficient passion and sense of service to their communities, committed to funding and developing the arts. The local authorities are perhaps a good place to start with cultivating the beginnings of talent.

Mr. King and I happened to be on the same iteration of the Arts Council from 2003 to 2009. Given that the Arts Council was doing a great deal to support emerging artists, one of the first questions we asked was about what we were doing for them after they had taken the council's encouragement, made the leap of faith, declared themselves as artists and committed themselves to the path, at which point we left them high and dry. It was a way of focusing on the fact that we must provide for the artists, just the makers themselves, from the beginning through to the end of their careers. It is the voluntary embrace of poverty. I am sorry to keep harping on about this, but that is the material consequence of electing to assume the life of an artist. Some few will be lucky - be it because of the zeitgeistor the quality of their talent, it is always impossible to say - and become self-sustaining. The fact that there are a small handful of artists who are self-sustaining can often serve to mask the fact, and the value, of investment across the board.

We are in thrall to defective economic thinking, so we want to know the outcome before we make an investment, but a hurling, rugby and camogie team cannot be built like that. At some point, we have to make a leap of faith, and investment in the arts is a leap of faith. We cannot tell in any one instance whether an investment will be returned, but we can say that, financially and using all other metrics, it will be returned from across the sector.

If we are to fund the arts, we must do it on a radically democratic basis. We must make it as available as possible to the largest number of people and not attempt to secure premature guarantees of the outcome. However, the Minister of State is right that there can be an excessive focus on excellence, but that raises a difficult question. If someone is really good and has an international reputation but is not making a living and cannot afford VHI - the majority of artists cannot afford private health insurance - do we stop sustaining that person? Using the metaphor of the field of wheat, one must cultivate the whole field. If some shoots do better than others, that is the luck of the draw, genetics or whatever.

On the practical side, and as imperfect as it is, the Arts Council is not an anonymous arts agency, not least because it employs peer review for much of its considerations in terms of individual artists. It is not a bad mechanism and it has the virtue of at least not attempting to produce regime art or harness prematurely the outcome of a work of artistic creation for the purposes of political propaganda. It places faith in people's maturity, intelligence and moral probity. That is a good thing, but it need not be the only model of support. In many sectors, the powers of local authorities have diminished simply by choking off central funding to them. Does one go to an impersonal bank or one's local credit union for a loan? Especially for people at the beginning who are tentative or intend to become accomplished but remain amateurs in their lives - I use the word "amateurs" in its etymological sense, that is, lovers of something rather than people who are less good than professionals - it would be better to go local, for their local authorities to fund them and for local authorities to have far more funding for scholarships, sessions, schools and every aspect of art support. However, that has to come from central government and would require a revolution of a kind none of us here wants to see, with local authorities wandering around like so many medieval barons levying their own incomes as it pleased them. It comes back to the same question that legislators face when considering national level funding for the arts - how much are we prepared to put our political weight behind adequate programmes of funding?

For many years, the Arts Council has attempted to build partnerships with local authorities, but it is not in a position to fund the authorities. Some of them have performed miracles with the funds at their disposal while others have been lethargic, but how are they to make these decisions without funding? It is like deciding which child will be allowed to die. If their central funding is earmarked - I do not know, as I have not thought it through to that level - and increased and there is an incentive to develop arts supports programmes, local authorities have an important role to play.