Dr. Audrey Whitty:

I will come in on the 2022 funding figures on behalf of the IMA. We looked in our submission paper at multi-annual funding for the NCIs and cultural institutions under category A6, but also for categories A1 to A3, which relate to meeting a specific cultural need and supporting the high-level goal of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in relation to enhancing access to the arts, culture and film sectors. We see the annual grant payments structure hopefully becoming more similar to the Arts Council, whereby organisations draw down up front with a declaration of assurance, rather than retribution or retroactive payments. That would help enormously in budgeting for 2022, as would a core funding package for independent, professionally run local museums to look at support areas such as collections management, insurance rates, security and facilities. That would bring in the Wi-Fi IT infrastructural component as a matter of urgency, which is a major barrier and impediment to the hybrid model of museum roll-out across the country.

On the Senator's comment regarding Longford, there are 12 local authority museum network museums across the Republic of Ireland. For those museums in particular, we see great potential in the arts and culture recovery task force Life Worth Living report of November 2020. There was an emphasis on the importance of working with the local authority cultural teams to deliver the recommendations of that report. We see Longford and all other counties as being front and centre in that.