Mr. Pádraig Naughton:

From our point of view, it is a development scheme and we do not have money to give to everyone. We try to make sure that as many people as possible are funded. A unique aspect of the arts and disability connect scheme is it is the only scheme that has a post-application process. After the deadline, we go through all the applications and try to work with the artists to make as many of them as eligible as possible. I do not mean that they get to rewrite their applications; far from it. We work with many artists who have very little experience of applying for funding. This is often a gateway into funding. I am delighted that many of the artists whom we have funded have gone on to achieve project awards and bursaries from the Arts Council, and sometimes from Create Ireland's artists in the community scheme. If artists apply and say that they want to create their project over 13 months, when the guidelines say 12, we would ask them to fix that, then it would be eligible. If we could see that they obviously had an imbalanced budget, we would ask them to fix it. We do not just try to get people to apply to the scheme, but we also work with them to learn from their applications and to get many of them through to a panel. Of the four panellists, we would always have one artist with a disability. We have funded many artists with intellectual disabilities. We are working to put infrastructure in place so that a person with an intellectual disability can sit on the panel and adjudicate on the applications with his or her peers.