Ms Maureen Kennelly:

The range of the members' questions reassures me greatly that the plans we have in place are absolutely hitting the buttons. I was nodding vigorously at everything the members were saying. There are many plans in train that will take on board their concerns.

Two members mentioned youth education and the ESRI report. The effect of the pandemic on young people, including children, is enormous. It is fantastic that formal schooling can continue but, as the Chairman said, there is genuine worry over the extracurricular activities. We have seen the massive, positive effect they have had on children's lives, both through cognitive development and the sense of satisfaction and well-being in life. We are anxious that extracurricular activities be allowed to restart as soon as possible, along with more structured arts events.

We talked about international travel. I agree that the hampering of international travel, both inwards and outwards, is a factor. Since we have a small market here, the international marketplace is important to artists. I welcome the suggestion that artists should be treated in the same way as elite sportspeople.

With regard to the difficulty with the application process, we have heard about this before, as the members have all acknowledged. It is a matter that we are very much taking on board. We will be launching a new IT system. There is a major transformation project ongoing in the council that will certainly make things easier and more flexible. In tandem with that, our very dedicated and highly motivated staff have delivered far more webinars this year for the various constituencies, including the dance, music and theatre sectors. Paradoxically, Zoom makes all this much easier.

One can invite hundreds of artists, arts administrators and arts workers to events like this. We will be doing more of those really essential, hand-holding exercises. Additionally, we are looking to appoint a number of access officers, although they may not end up being called that. They will be located throughout the country and will be dedicated to helping people with the application forms. We will streamline and simplify them, but we will put in place extra resources, saying to people that we hear them, that these are too difficult and that we want to make those key resources available.

Deputy Cannon talked about Clifden. I want to highlight that Tuam has been a creative place all this year and has done astounding work. We are in wholehearted agreement with the Deputy about the absolute impact that communities on the ground can have. We will be nominating more creative places over the next few years because, as we have seen, the impact in Tuam has been terrific, with people taking over the town hall. It has been a really positive result for us.

We have seen that the way we all live is going to change dramatically in the coming years. More people will live closer to their homeplaces and live away from cities. I am from a small village in north Kerry and I have lived all over Ireland. That is a subject so close to my heart and that of the rest of the team at the Arts Council. We are looking at the whole country as a sort of civic forcefield whereby there will be fantastic pockets of activity. We are coming down with thousands of gifted artists and we have a necklace of art centres where we can stitch the Backstage, the Garage, the Ramor Theatre into their communities of artists. We are going to do powerful work in years to come.

On the specific topic of First Music Contact, it is one of our key strategic funded organisations. It brought together an independent panel to disburse those funds. That panel consisted of a very wide range of expert people and we were consulted on the make-up of that panel. It was able to disburse those funds very quickly, to a very wide range of artists, including those who would never have seen those funds as being available to them. Similarly, the live music stimulus has been delivered separately by the Department. We are in close contact with the Department all the time about them because everything has changed so much and there are new ventures. We have full confidence in and applaud First Music Contact on the Trojan work it did in disbursing those funds.

We had a Covid award earlier this year, which we introduced very quickly upon the onset of Covid-19. A total of 67% of applicants to that fund were entirely new, many from the music industry. That is what one finds. The pandemic hit just as St. Patrick's Day was about to fall. Everybody from the Altans of this world to Jack Lukeman are all now in desperate need of funding, because their source of income has been obliterated.

It is a new vista for us because there are people who would never have seen us as a viable source of funding. We will be looking at the ways we work in terms of how we can allocate for these people in this new dawn.