Mr. Ray Yeates:

There are three parts to everything. There are the aspirations and, unfortunately, if we are always dealing with aspirations, we will keep dealing with aspirations. They have to be translated into policy and then they have to be implemented. People get stuck in one space or the other. Arts people need to be embedded at the point of planning, not just afterwards. In the case of the Dublin edge, there will be 50,000 new houses in that area. What arts infrastructure is planned? Will we have large areas of the city without cultural institutions? Will it be after everything else is done that we try to fit the arts in somewhere? It will not work that way. There will be a tremendous amount of compromise buildings and compromise places which are under-resourced because it is an afterthought. We need to bring it into the planning process, as we are trying to do in the development plan.

I am sorry to speak against the local authorities but we sometimes need nimbler structures. Dublin founded a culture company after our bid for the European Capital of Culture that perhaps is not as constrained by procedure and approach, and that can get out and work at the capillary. That is what we are talking about now: we are talking about a boxing club engaging with an artist. Sometimes, we need a nimbler structure to do that. Those things can be embedded and instead of drawing down public art as being an “if you remember to do it” kind of thing, it could be said that it must be drawn down. We want to see that.