Professor Brian Singleton:

There has been an explosion of creative arts education in the country in the past ten years. Virtually all third-level educational providers have some kind of creative arts education, not least of which is my university which is the biggest provider of such education and training. I was the co-founder, with Ms Danielle Ryan, of The Lir, which is the National Academy of Dramatic Art, and I will talk largely about the theatre sector and the training for it, and how the training has shifted radically in the past number of years given the environment into which the students will emerge. In addition to the core artistic skills that each programme provides to students, there is a strong emphasis on professional development, pushing the creative sectors in new directions and helping them engage, not only with theatre but with other platforms. I should say that virtually all of that education is based in the sector with sectoral professional.

In addition, I head up a research theme in the college, called "Creative Arts Practice", that brings together all the researchers and artists in the core arts together with other disciplines in the pure sciences, health sciences, computer sciences and engineering that employ creative arts in their practices and products. This is an interface between the work of the sciences and the artists for public consumption. In all of this, we are training students not to wait for the telephone to ring. We are training them to create work for themselves in the absence of the telephone ringing.

The creative arts rely heavily on public subsidy. The theatre sector currently is funded at the high end of achievement in terms of a small number of theatre companies, service providers and schemes for the development of established practitioners, and this is right and proper for a country with such a strong reputation, particularly in theatre.

What concerns me is a large independent sector that applies for project funding on an annual basis, with an average output of one or two artistic productions per year. That sector is by and large underproductive in terms of the skills and potential of those who work in it on an ad hocbasis. While some of the independent productions break through to a wider public, few, if any, have the capacity for larger commercial development. Outside the theatre sector, there are drama-related activities in multiple formats, including the gaming sector, assistive technologies in the health sciences and multi-platform televisual content that others can speak to. To date, many of these activities have had no engagement with the independent creative arts sector, deriving, as they do, from the sciences and engineering, rather than the artistic, side. Essentially, I see the independent sector as underproductive and needing to move into what I call a "new creative economy".

In my written submission to the committee, I cited two examples. I will not go into them in depth. One is a theatre company funded by the Arts Council that runs an annual scheme, called "Show in a Bag". The scheme involves small-scale funding for a new idea that tests the market and is then able to expand once it has its own market.

The other is from another graduate of mine, Triona Campbell, who set up a company called beActive media. She wrote, devised and produced the first online Irish soap opera and that is the first Irish drama to move from online to television. It is not on Irish television, however; she sold it to a Brazilian TV company. She speaks fluent Portuguese, which helps. Her company is now producing multi-platform drama, which is not just for television. There is lots of online content, books, Apps, etc. One of her key principles is growing a fan base through interacting with the public and that is how an arts product can grow.

Creative arts practitioners working largely in the independent sector with small and very intermittent impact could benefit from contact with people working within business and enterprise in order to maximise the potential of the outputs - that can be seen in Show in a Bag, for instance - and also to diversify the energies and skills working in other media in interdisciplinary ways. That can be seen in beActive media. With my proposed collaboration, new ideas, schemes and outputs could be developed and supported through a system of what I call angel investors, one of which could be the State, to invest in these arts in a bag projects. Small artistic outputs can be used to test the market and grow a fan base and can develop further beyond that.

Resources exist within arts education in the colleges as they stand but there is no national co-ordination. We are all in competition with each other. There is no co-ordination in terms of bringing people from industry, sciences, engineering and arts together. The aim is to invigorate the highly creative though at times dormant independent arts sector to produce new work to rival the small number of publicly funded artistic outputs and to have the potential to be attractive to overseas markets. When beActive media could not find an outlet for their own drama within Ireland, they were able to move into another market very successfully and employ quite a number of people at home.