Mr. Ray Yeates:

There were general observations and specific questions, and I will address those. There will be good news around artists' workspaces in the next couple of weeks. I have been engaged in this area for at least six years. There is an acknowledged deficit. Anyone who works in the arts is well aware of artists' lack of economic power. When it comes to rent, how does someone address his or her lack of economic power? This is a great area in which the Government could intervene and try to incentivise certain types of building. In what is a very competitive market, artists have been marginalised. That has been the case for some time.

It has been important for us to identify and buy or otherwise secure buildings or to see whether we could use buildings of our own. We are also dealing with significant demands from other sectors for the temporary and permanent use of buildings. There is no arts emergency – it is difficult to create one – so artists will easily find themselves being pushed away by short-term concerns.

To answer the specific question about Chatham Row, this is a place where Dublin City Council moved quickly to put in artists for temporary use, but it is important there is a process. I receive complaints all the time from individual artists saying they never had a chance to apply for use of a building and that it seemed to have been assigned in a certain way, so we are going to have an open call. An open call is our best practice way of working on a building. In the case of the Filmbase building, which acquired new tenants recently, there was an open call, with a lot of applications, rounds and transparency. For Chatham Row, there will be an open call before the end of the year. It is a short-term licence that Press Up is under in Chatham Row. That is the simple answer to that question.

I am joined by the official who deals with all the street art permissions, Ms Maher. I will transfer to her to deal with those specific questions.

As for how many workspaces we need, we surveyed 500 artists of the 3,000 or so in our administrative area and about 40% required space. If we extrapolate that, it is a large number of spaces. It is about finding the capacity within the arts community to manage spaces, given we cannot manage all the ones we put there. We also carried out an audit of workspaces. Not as many have been lost as is sometimes the perception. People may have moved into more insecure spaces, but spaces are still occurring and are managed. There are quite a lot of spaces in the city for artists, although there need to be a lot more. I hope we will get 200 or 250 done in the next five years. That is the target I am working for. We should not confuse public art with street art or Per Cent for Art because they go through different processes.