Mr. Noel Kelly:

I thank the Senator for the question. It gets to the crux of a great deal. First, artistic freedom is not for one set of beliefs. We have a problem in Ireland of a social media bubble that we need to address if we are going to talk about true artistic freedom. I agree that we, as a society, have to get comfortable with equitable opportunity for different thoughts and systems of belief and how we feel about this freedom of expression. A lot of work by Muse has been done on that area.

Were I to try to distil it and take it outside very specific art forms I would say that two things are in place. First, anything to do with public funding is being driven by a society of fear of accountability. Every process that is put in place can be questioned at local authority level, in the Dáil and by the media. That leads to a closing down of openness. This is because openness is usually rewarded with negativity. We have seen this in the case of art projects which were very well meaning which were eventually questioned in such a way that they were closed down.

There is another aspect that I touched on briefly. It is dealt with in detail in the document. The arts are subject to project funding. Sustainable funding does not exist as standard. Project funding can be multi-annual if you are lucky. We talked earlier about sustainability in the arts. It is very hard to get an arts organisation to dream about 100 years in the future if it cannot figure out how it will pay the next electricity bill. When we are talking about the freedom of artistic expression, we are also looking at what is put in place for the long term. There are some very good people in the Department who are taking that kind of view of the future. On a practical level, however, by the time it gets to the individual artist or arts organisation, they are operating on a year-by-year basis so there is precarity. With a publicly funded artist studio, an artist is given a maximum two years and nine months occupancy, and that is if they can get a studio. It is more likely they will get a year. Anything non-public funded is expensive. Artist studios, if one can get one, have a range of rents of either €250 or €800 a month. No artist can afford €800 a month. Affordable sustainable spaces are possible. If it is publicly funded, however, then the maximum someone can stay there is for two years and nine months. That might suit someone in the early stages of their career, but the voice that is missing in all the discussions, because they are not trendy or like to be seen, if the middle layer of artists who are in a kind of mid-career mode. They will have moved three and four times. The document I provided has a quote from an artist who had to ditch all the materials they used to make their work because they had to move out of their studio. We can get some new studios but we also need to put a system in place that does not begrudge an artist having access to it. The thinking is that if an artist stays beyond the two years and nine months, apart from the tenancy agreement perspective, it is seen that the taxpayer is overly subsidising that individual artist. That is the logic that is used. Until we change the public perception of accountability and transparency around public spending and develop a level of trust, we cannot fix this.