Ms Sin?ad O'Reilly:

The tagline for Culture Night is "One night for all". That is as much an ambition as it is a challenge. It is about organisations and organisers of Culture Night events ensuring their events truly are welcoming to everybody and relevant to the diverse communities we have. One of the other things we are expanding with Culture Night is Culture Night Late.

This is working across the night-time economy and, with the support of the Department, we will be able to expand how we can invest in pilot projects for Culture Night that will take place well into the night. When Culture Night moved over to the Arts Council, we looked at some research behind it and we could see that only 9% of events during Culture Night happened after 9 p.m. Therefore, somewhere along the way, the "night" part of Culture Night had been neglected. We are expanding that back. We are already seeing from the initial piloting of events that we are beginning to raise the numbers of young people who are participating in Culture Night. Younger audiences are coming back and the programme is becoming relevant to them. This is allowing the Arts Council to have conversations with organisations that we may not ordinarily have had before. It has been really welcome to do that.

We have a national stewardship group over Culture Night, which includes organisations such as the Heritage Council, the OPW, the Union of Students of Ireland, USI, Arts and Disability Ireland and New Communities Partnership. We are working across a range of areas to make sure that those who are heavily invested in and who feel ownership over Culture Night are at the table and are discussing it with us. We are calling this stewardship because we do not want to take a top-down approach, because the grassroots part of Culture Night is really important to protect.