Ms Angela Dorgan:

I do not know the answer but I do know we are way down the European pecking order in terms of how much we invest in the arts. Our proportion of investment is between 0.1% and 0.2% of GDP while that of an average European country is 0.6% of GDP.

To make a personal observation, I can guess the arts have always sustained themselves because people who make art have to make art. Nobody makes art for profit. There is a benefit that one can make commerce from art. We have traditionally been asked by successive Governments in this country to justify the economic value of art, but nobody ever asks us to justify the esoteric and societal value of the arts. Every last one of us saw that value during the Covid pandemic. We noted the music, television and books. Events featuring some beautiful work by Irish artists were brought to life on the Internet and television. We were all gripped by Connell's necklace in "Normal People" and we watched "Ireland Performs". We are all still watching "Other Voices: Courage", and we are buoyed up, pacified and comforted by all that. One will never hear from the arts sector that the arts are not worth investing in, but the funding is still less than in 2008, when the sector was last cut. Right across the board, the sector been dying a death by a thousand cuts, yet it has still sustained itself.

We have a unique moment in time now as a society and republic to really look at ourselves in the mirror coming out of the Covid pandemic and decide what we value in society. We need to put arts at the top. Various parts of an economy need help every now and again. We in the arts should never be asked to justify the arts or answer the question "Why the arts?" just as we should not be asked to answer the questions "Why education?" or "Why health?". It should be immediately answerable. We should not really have to be coming together here in the way we are. Governments all over the world immediately responded to their arts and entertainment sectors. If we as a country value our artists as much as we say we do and as much as we sell ourselves as a country based on them, we should invest in infrastructure that sustains them. We should also invest in all the layers under the iceberg that produce the world-beating artists and events that we produce.