Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

That is a good question. The theatre community in Dublin is quite a small community. Is it right that we are spending public money competing? These are difficult ventures to make money on in any event from any of the private companies. Personally, I would have questioned that. Is it right that we are going into this space when they are all struggling to recover from Covid, make money over the Christmas period, etc.? Personally, I do not think it was the right decision in that respect either. In everything we try to do - we have a statutory obligation to try to explore commercial opportunities - we always have got to weigh up the impact on commercial companies, private companies, etc. We are making those decisions. That is part of our public service responsibility. We do not get paid to go and compete with what the market is doing brilliantly on its own, in my view, and that would weigh very heavily. In terms of whether we will do anything like this again, I am pleased to say that the Toy Show The Musicalset is gone now. There would be an extremely high threshold. Given the failure of this, given what I have just said about going into a space where private companies are struggling to make a success of it anyway, there would be a high threshold for anything on that kind of scale. I fully support and believe in the concert orchestra. I went to that concert. There were 2,000 people there and the audience loved it. It is a great thing to do. I support the concert orchestra and I hope we will be doing more with it around the country. On whether we should be doing these kind of ventures, I very much doubt the Senator will see it during my tenure, however long that lasts.