Mr. Theo Dorgan:

I rather like the Senator's idea that we should have a Ministry of the national imagination but I can just see the reaction in some quarters in Dáil Éireann to an announcement that we are going to have a Minister for the Imagination. I, of course, completely agree with the Senator in substance.

I would like, for a moment, to go back to Deputy Smyth's question about practicalities. The committee would hardly expect us to come up with a programme of investment and a blueprint for how money is to be spent. The crucial change that is needed is to shift from a mindset that money is given or granted to the arts to a firm and unshakable understanding that we are talking about investment. If the collectivity of arts activity in this country was to be brought together under a shareholders' offering and offered on the market, as it were, as a business, we would be beating off investors.

I agree with Mr. King that, when the Indecon report came out, everybody thought salvation was coming without reckoning with the Department of Finance and its absolute inability to grasp the concept of investment. In 1968, the Arts Council grant-in-aid was €68 million, €47 million of which directly came back from arts organisations funded in PAYE, PRSI and VAT. The return to the economy from the €21 million of investment was €147 million directly attributable to those organisations. If someone gave me €21 and, at the end of the year, I gave them €147 back, is it not the height of foolishness to give me €19 next year? If the situation was reversed, I would give that person €42 the following year if I had it. We need to understand this is investment in an enormous collectivity of entrepreneurs. We fetishise the quality of the entrepreneur in this country but, in fact, every artist, theatre company and arts centre is an entrepreneurial enterprise.

I want to turn again from the idea that we want to somehow emphasise the special position or privileges, or notional privileges, of the individual artist. I want to look at all of us. The population of our Republic is 8,000 people more than the population of metropolitan Boston. The population of the metropolitan area of Boston is 4.6 million and we are something like 4.68 million at the moment. There is no comparison between the reputational value accruing to the State of Ireland from the work of its artists to that which comes out of Boston. I cannot, off the top of my head, think of a world-renowned figure from Boston and I could keep us here all day talking about the quality of Irish artists of considerable worldwide achievement. We should not be asked to demonstrate the value of what we do any longer. We should not be going, cap in hand, as it were, to ask for a dig out and for more to do what we do. We should turn the question around and ask who we want to be, as a proud people. What do we do, in the 21st century, for meaning in a post-religious, polyvalent culture with people from all over the world joining us in citizenship and bringing the streams of their inheritances to bear?

I can tell the committee there is a generation of new Irish poets coming through who will blow the minds of committee members. I am beginning to see these seeds coming through.

This is a new Ireland. This is a country with a proud history but a shameful reputation in being proud of itself and in cherishing one another. That is true. There are deep elements of shame in how we treat many of our citizens. Yet, we do not have to be like that. One hundred years ago, who would have said that the little island of Ireland could set in train the dissolution of the biggest empire the world had ever seen? Anyone suggesting that would have been told they were insane even to think about it, but we imagined it otherwise. That is my recurrent question. If we can imagine ourselves as bigger and better and filled with right pride – not grandiosity but actual pride - in ourselves and in one another, then what would we not do for one another? This will involve material resources but it also involves a commitment to changing a mindset that does not believe in supporting the arts in schools. Who has that mindset? The people of Ireland believe in doing so. I am asking about those making the decisions. If I go into a secondary school in this country and ask people whether they would rather economics or music, can members guess what the answer would be? We all know what the answer would be. There is a disconnect between what the people who grant Government its authority want and what the Government, once in place, decides it may have. We have to begin to dissolve that boundary. We need to do it as a matter of urgency because if we do not and if the economists get too used to being in the saddle, then God help us all.