Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Artists tick all the boxes on the 11 grounds we use to measure poverty. Report after report from the Theatre Forum, Visual Artists Ireland, the Arts Council, etc., indicates artists are earning less than €12,000 per year. Reversing the cuts to the PUP was our priority in the budget and it is disappointing that has not happened.

It follows that we must protect the primary resource of the industry, namely, the artist. I know artists who got out of Dublin straightaway as their leases were coming to an end. It will probably happen anyway but is it time to consider a better geographical spread when disbursing the Arts Council's budget? Some local authorities spend a couple of cents per head of population on their arts budget. There is, therefore, a democratic deficit arising from how we spend money on the arts across the State. How would the witnesses like the Arts Council's additional money to be spent? Can we ever go back to allocations of less than €100 million?