Mr. Noel Kelly:

We put some fairly strong recommendations into the document, especially the one on studio spaces. There are many good initiatives at the moment. Not all are in the public realm. Some are much further advanced than others. There was one very specific recommendation that we included. Regardless of whatever legislation or directive that is put in place to stipulate what a property developer must provide, most developers do not care. A developer will comply, but they will also find a loophole to get out of it. We have seen this in many cases. What a property developer does care about is value and how they can refinance their loans based on the value of their portfolio. If you look at that value, an arts organisation is really down the pecking order. We have no value. An individual artist is not worth anything. Maybe a funding body is worth slightly more. If you get up to a local government layer or a national government layer, however, and they are the ones guaranteeing the rents, then the value to the property developer going back is actually huge. That is really attractive to them. We need to find a mechanism to go in and provide a guarantee for the tenancy. It is not a guarantee on loans. The system is in place for an entity like NAMA to look at that financial mechanism with the property developers at the financial level because that is the conversation we need to have with them rather than one of “Great. We need culture in our areas”.