Ms Maureen Kennelly:

To explain for people, arts grant funding is one of 34 schemes that are run by the Arts Council. We made a decision last year to increase funding to strategically funded organisations and arts centres by 10%. We obviously have vastly more resources than we had, but the demand is enormous. There has been a 245% increase in demand, as the Deputy said, over the last three years. Therefore, we had to make a decision about investing in the strategically funded organisations and the arts centres, which are populated throughout the country. There are 66 arts centres throughout the country, so they are most definitely not all Dublin based. While it may seem that with the strategically funded organisations, there is more of a bias towards Dublin, in fact, there is not. We have the Irish National Opera, INO, which has toured 23 counties this year, or the new national dance company, Luail, which will impact on eight different counties. Therefore, I accept that while the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre are in Dublin, organisations like Poetry Ireland and the INO will tour significantly and bring their fantastic offerings to audiences throughout the country.

The strategically funded organisations and the arts centres are certainly drivers of employment. The arts grant funding is in a different bracket whereby it is programme funding. We are very committed to trying to increase those organisations in the future because we realise that across the arts sector, costs have risen astronomically for people in terms of travel and accommodation - those are huge issues - and also energy costs. We were very glad to receive extra funding from the Department to address those energy costs in recent years. However, we simply need more money. I would like to reassure people that all the spending on this failed IT project was capital money. It simply was never the case that any arts organisation or any individual was disadvantaged by spend on this. That is simply not the case.