Ms Garry Hynes:

It is one thing to be young and to start a theatre company, as I did with my colleagues. It is one thing to be aged 25, 26 or 27 and want to be an actor but the numbers who stop being professional actors because they cannot even make the most rudimentary living from it are significant. The rate of exit from the profession is enormous. One does not just decide to do it and survive. What happens when someone marries, assumes new responsibilities, has aging parents or gets sick, for example? Almost every day I am disturbed by seeing so many actors that I knew as young people in states of enthusiasm and delight at being actors who have no pension and who are facing lives of real poverty. These are actors who work. I am not just talking about actors who do not work. These are important people who helped found theatres in this country. Their names are ones that people around this table would recognise. They are people who are well known but they are finding it hard to put two pennies together to fund their lives and those of their children.