Ms Maureen Kennelly:

I recall the Deputy asking that question the last time. It is a struggle and always a challenge. The staff complement of the Arts Council was seriously depleted after the last economic crash. The budget for the Arts Council went down significantly. Effectively, then, we were just building the staff back up. While the number seems quite startling in terms of the increase, in fact it was just getting it back to a base level. As our remit had expanded and we had a vastly increased number of applicants, we needed far more staff. As I said before, the senior IT resource was the critical one. Just to remind ourselves, the intention with this undertaking concerns the artists and is to bring forward a system so the arts community can make better applications to us. It is to ensure artists will not be spending undue time doing so and we will be able to open up the field to a far wider range of artists who will not find our systems forbidding.