Mr. Pádraig Naughton:

I will respond to two questions then pass over to my colleagues. There are arts centres, venues and buildings that are not accessible. I will not name them. As Ms Ní Chonchubhair said, many art centres are relatively recent additions and are accessible. Some arts centres, venues or other buildings have activities that need to be located to somewhere else. We did an access audit with a local authority. It was not just that it did not want to make the building accessible, but because of a right of way, it did not have the space to do it. The conclusion of the arts officer in that place was that the centre needed to be relocated.

Regarding arts and disability connect, there are awards of €15,000 for new work, €5,000 for research and development, €3,000 for mentoring and €1,000 for training. It would be great to have no more awards. However, we have increased the new work award from €8,000 to €15,000. We then started to notice that more and more artists were having issues with the Department of Social Protection. Awarding more money if we cannot solve some of the other issues that are outside of our control will not necessarily fix the issues.