Ms Katherine Licken:

If the Deputy will indulge me for a minute, I will go back to the issue of the new Department and the synergies between tourism, media, culture and sport. As our new Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, said earlier this week, if we look at sport and culture, in particular, and what they tell us about who we are and how we identify as a nation, there are huge synergies in the challenges facing those sectors in the light of the impact of Covid-19.

That feeds directly into tourism. As Mr. Kelly stated, 70% of tourism is from overseas. We saw digital programmes in the Other Voices Courage programme and the Ireland Performs series, which had enormous reach internationally. Tourism Ireland came back to us promptly to state that was having a huge impact, and we pushed it out through the embassy network. There are, therefore, huge synergies and also major synergies with broadcasting because, again, we collaborated very closely with RTÉ. Public sector broadcasting throughout the pandemic really showed its importance. That was very much the case for us in the cultural sector in pushing out content, which was widely welcomed.

Ms Banotti may wish to speak about the season in the cultural sector, but regarding funding I assure the committee that we have a long list of things we have done digitally. We pivoted how we do things to get material online and get artists paid for their work rather than doing it for free. We are also looking at having some festivals in the programme go ahead in a safe way, insofar as that is possible. Ms Banotti may wish to elaborate on that aspect.