Mr. Damien McGlynn:

Picking up on the Senator’s initial question on how we ensure fair wages with standstill funding, which many of us might be experiencing, it is easy to say we need more funding and we all will say that. Much of the time, the answer we miss is that we need to do less. Across the whole sector, we are bad at that. It is the nature of competitive funding. We have a history of promising to do more with less and that leads to burnout, as was said, and people leaving the sector. There was much evidence of that a few years back when the recession hit. People did not scale back operations; the work just fell on unpaid or poorly paid staff. That led to much of the campaigning we have seen in the past ten years about paying people fairly.

Artists are often just really bad at paying themselves properly - not costing that in. Create Ireland does a lot of work with artists to support them in applying for funding from us and others. We try to instil in them that application writing is part of their work. It is not a separate thing they have to do. It is part of being an artist and they need to see this holistically. It is still tough to get back that time and the payment for that time retrospectively.

On managing funding applications, we have done much work in recent years, particularly on accessibility and trying to make funding more accessible to artists from more diverse backgrounds. The work we do administering funding on behalf of the Arts Council has allowed us to test things. I am happy to say the Arts Council is always receptive to the learning of our experiences. However, it is an issue. We have looked at a lot of the statistics around diversity of applicants. It is one of those things where people will say it is open to everybody, so it is not exclusive. However, we see that there are certain people who do not make it past the first few hurdles. We have done much work to try to see how we can put supports in place for that.