Ms Angela Dorgan:

It is great to see how many around the Dáil Chamber got to a barber so far, now that they are open.

I regard the arts sector as a house of cards in terms of funding. I am not referring to the HBO show. I wish to refer to the moneys with which the arts sector, festivals and events fund themselves and that allows them to put on work by, support and pay artists. My organisation is partly funded by the Arts Council. We use that funding to develop programmes and we can sometimes access international funding for parts of our programme. A major part of the funding, the third part, is from ticket sales and sponsorship. Since there are no events, we have nothing to offer sponsors. Since a big chunk of our annual event, Ireland Music Week, will be online, we have far fewer pouring opportunities to offer drinks sponsors and far fewer to make it an attractive element. On an organisation-by-organisation basis, it means we have reduced capacity to hire Ms O'Connor's event company, with which we work, and it means we have reduced capacity to generate any sponsorship.

Typically, the Arts Council funding we get is about two thirds of what we need to stay open as an organisation. It is the funding that allows us to stay open for the rest of the year as an organisation. People should consider what is left when ticket sales and sponsorship opportunities are taken away. It is not as if everybody gets 100% funding in the arts sector. I am referring to what happens with the national resource organisations, local events and festivals. When any one of the cards comes under threat, the whole house falls. The NCFA looked for so much funding for artists because the organisations and events are not hiring them or paying them. It is a matter of the Arts Council being able to intercept to determine where the key organisations are under threat because they cannot generate ticket sales. Some 50% of the income of the Project Arts Centre, for example, is non-funded. Events such as ours and venues such as those to which I have alluded are left wide open to the problems of dissemination and evacuation, which many Deputies have talked about. If we cannot be supported to keep our card going so we will be in a position, when we re-emerge, to generate more funding through our events and hire colleagues in the events industry, there will be a very bleak landscape. We are innovative and intelligent, and we have all referred to that. If help can be provided in the three areas in any way, it will be of benefit. I refer to a tax regime encompassing more types of sponsorship and ways to invest in an organisation just so it can exist and so we will not always have to look for sponsorship for events. There is a suite.

To refer to a previous question, all of this can be worked out in a task force along with a timeline. A big threat to organisations is that they do not know how long they have to budget for without the three lines of income.