Mr. Joe Caslin:

Yes. Then I have to go to the local roads authority in case I have to close down a road. I will have to pay for that. If I have to close down a road, it will cost on average approximately €2,200. All of that comes with a huge amount of bureaucratic work. I do not know if anyone has recently tried to apply for planning permission, but it is quite a big document. How do you traverse that document as an artist? Dublin City Council even says, as I have said in my statement, that it is an onerous task. They are there to guide you through it, but it can work in other ways.

There is the avenue of working in partnership with a council to receive a planning exemption. This works, but it can be very ad hoc. For example, if I go to Waterford City and County Council, Kilkenny County Council - which was here the other day - and Tipperary County Council, they will all deal with me quite differently, so I will not know what to appreciate or what will be ahead of me when I head down there.

Commissions are, in the main, about being nice.They amplify a specific place. Hard topics are often avoided and when they are chosen, the edges are really rounded off. While this allows quality control, the artists' voices are restricted. I am very wary of advertisements. If a work of street art becomes an advertisement, it will tell you how think and how to act. Similarly, if the only player in the room is the council, the artist will have to act in a very particular way. If that council is quite restrictive, left wing or right wing, you will have to create work that is in that manner.

The last way I can enter is through legal walls. They do not really exist. It is said that they do. There are a few random walls that exist here and there. However, if I go to Sydney, there are zoned places, so there are many abundant numbers of walls that I can go to. When I was in Sofia, which was during a time when a huge migrant influx came from Syria, if I wanted to install a work, I could apply for permission afterwards. I would not have to apply for it before the artwork has gone up.

The Senator has also spoken previously about an artwork being in the moment. It was very much in the moment through the work in the last two referendums. They were quite impactful. They added to the discourse around whichever way you voted. There was merit. It was a space that was beautiful to watch. There are all those different nuances and avenues you can get into.

In 2015 in Belfast, I applied for planning permission and the response was, "What?". You do not apply for planning permission in Belfast because there is a culture of walls and there is the stuff that is there already. That has somewhat changed, but I do not have to apply for planning permission. I go in, they consider my background, they consider the work I have made before and they consider what is in front of them. It is not a matter of a drawn-out, five-month-long procedure that costs me so much.