Professor Kevin Rafter:

I thank the Chairman and members for the invitation to meet today. I am delighted to have been nominated by the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Deputy Madigan, to serve as chairman of the Arts Council. I very much look forward to starting in the role shortly. I will be the tenth person to hold this position since the council was established under the Arts Act 1951. It is fair to say no organisation plays a more important role in supporting the arts in Ireland than the Arts Council. This position was set out in the original legislation in 1951. It was reaffirmed in the 1973 Act and again in the 2003 Act.

As head of the school of communications at Dublin City University, I currently lead Ireland's largest university centre for media and communications. It has almost 1,000 students and was recently rated amongst the top 200 globally in the subject areas. I was previously head of the department of film and media at Institute of Art, Design and Technology, IADT, Dún Laoghaire. Prior to 2008, I held senior editorial positions with a number of media companies, including RTÉ and The Irish Times, during a 14-year career as a political journalist. More recently, I have added significant experience as an independent non-executive director. Until 2019, I served two terms on the board of Dublin Bus, where I was also a member of the audit and risk committee. I have served on the boards of Oxfam Ireland and the Galway International Arts Festival. The latter produces one of Europe's leading arts festivals as well as developing and producing new work that tours nationally and internationally. I have experience working in the role of chairman, including as chair of the expert advisory committee of Culture Ireland, which has responsibility for promoting Irish arts worldwide, and as chair of the compliance committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. While serving in these roles, I deepened my understanding of governance processes through ongoing training, including at the Law Society of Ireland and the Institute of Directors. In accepting the position of chair of the Arts Council, I have resigned from a number of the aforementioned roles to remove any possible conflicts of interest.

My involvement and interest in the arts sector arises in part from my role in the education sector, my involvement with Culture Ireland and having been a board member of Galway International Arts Festival but also from my long-standing personal interest in the visual arts, theatre, literature and film. In my previous career in the media, while I primarily worked as a political journalist, I also produced and presented a number of radio documentaries on visual artists. Going back a little farther, or longer than a little farther, I originally trained as an economist. My final year undergraduate project was an econometric study of the prices of the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, the findings of which I probably cannot recall. At that time, I was also a volunteer in a community radio station in Dublin City, Anna Livia, where I worked on the station's arts programme.

In preparing for today, I read the Oireachtas debates on the original arts legislation from 1951. In a Second Stage debate in the Seanad, one Member told the House:

The definition of artist nowadays is a man with long hair or a woman with short hair; they seem to need no other qualifications than that. When I see pictures exhibited by a lot of modern artists I wish that we had not any modern art. They are not painting; they are not pictures. If anything at all, they are a puzzle.

There is little in this contribution I would agree with.