Ms Sin?ad O'Reilly:

I will address some of Senator Warfield's comments on the spend by local government on the arts. We have been tracking and monitoring local government spend through our partnership with it for many years. At the moment, we see that local government expenditure on the arts may dip and lower from time to time if there is capital expenditure. If we are tracking the revenue expenditure, it is approximately €40 million. There is a disparity across local authorities as the Senator has pointed out. That is not anyone's fault in particular, local authorities are just different to one another whether it is around the rates base or whether the resourcing is there to support that. Where we have been able to support that more is by creating strategic interventions with some local authorities to increase their capacity. More recently, we have been able to increase staffing within local authorities through a special staffing scheme so they can do more and achieve more resources as a result. We are very happy to talk further about those figures, if that is needed.