Mr. Shane Dunne:

I can see that Ms Dorgan is ready to go with the answer to this so I will respond quickly from our side. It has been so obvious in recent weeks and massive packages have been doled out in New Zealand, Germany and other countries. The arts in this country have been grossly underfunded for years and now, during Covid, the chickens are coming home to roost. Ms Dorgan might talk about the funded sector because she knows far more about it than I do.

From a non-funded point of view, as to why we are so overlooked, we have never previously asked. As we stated in our submission, we are entrepreneurs, innovators and small businesses. We go out there and make things happen, and we do it off our own steam.

That applies from David Mongey, to Murt Whelan, who has a PA company, to Shields Mobile Stages, Cork, right up to Peter Aiken and MCD. They have done it themselves. We have never asked before. I suppose that if one does not ask, one does not get, but we are here today and we are asking because we have no choice but to do so.