Cecilia Keaveney (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)

I am pleased to represent one of the areas covered by the pilot programme. It is unusual for an area north of a line running from Dublin to Galway to be selected for a pilot scheme, even a bad one. The Minister referred to the relative expense of the Music Network projects. If she saw the results on the ground in terms of how children who had no access to music have been able to access music at affordable rates or if she were to evaluate the funding on the basis of the number of children gaining from the pilot project, she would find that €100,000 is a pittance. County Donegal now has peninsula orchestras and choirs which it never had previously.

My core message is that music is not simply a subject on the school curriculum. If a child engages in music in its early years, it will benefit from rhythmic development, co-ordination, language development and focus. The Joint Committee on Arts, Sport, Tourism, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, which I chair, commissioned and published a report on music and young people. Using County Donegal as an example, the report provides concrete examples of how non-academic children who are exposed to music, for example, the beating of a drum, subsequently focused on reading and other learning tasks set by their teachers.

We must decide that arts are a key mechanism for personal development and music is about more than creating future musicians or audiences. To make the funding available for music go further, will the Minister co-ordinate with the Minister for Health and Children, given the importance of music therapy for people with disabilities, Alzheimer's disease and so forth, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, given that the Arts Council is developing a similar type of scheme for schools, and the Minister of State with responsibility for children, Deputy Brian Lenihan, with regard to interventions at an early age? Perhaps if we decided to make what the Minister described as an "expensive" investment at an early stage in children's lives, other interventions required in later years to tackle dyslexia, dyspraxia and other problems would no longer be necessary.

I know the Minister's heart is in the right place. Does she agree, however, that unless we decide that the arts are central to the holistic development of children, irrespective of whether they are disabled, able-bodied or of low or high intellect, we will not win the argument in which Deputies have engaged today?

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