Ms Maureen Kennelly:

We will be delighted to give feedback from the festivals conference because I am sure it come up repeatedly over the next two days. What we see coming through from communities is the lifeblood of culture. That is why Creative Schools is such a groundbreaking initiative. Someone pointed out earlier that this is Creative Schools Celebration Week so there is a huge range of activity. This level of investment in schools, and the collaboration between arts and education now, is groundbreaking stuff and is tremendously exciting for us.

Our colleagues from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland are here today. People may not know that we jointly fund 14 organisations together on the island. We also work extremely closely with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, most recently in terms of the Shared Island initiative and with the Department and Department of An Taoiseach. We support our Northern colleagues in terms of raising the level of investment because we think it is absolutely incredible what they do with tiny amounts of funding. A huge number of artists from the South are moving to Belfast and elsewhere in the North so we need to be very aware of the issue of restricted resources.