Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. I will address the issue of funding and support for local community arts projects. Given the current economic climate and the daily reality of stress and anxiety in hundreds of thousands of homes across this state, the role of such schemes is immense in real terms. The arts have many benefits for individuals and society. They provide us with inspiring ideas and new meanings. They symbolise aspects of the world and can express meanings for communities and groups through, for example, pictures or plays about important events. Through the arts, children can develop a range of skills, self-confidence and ways to work better with others. Arts events bring people together.

Policy makers, arts practitioners and researchers have suggested that participation in arts activity can result in a broad range of positive effects. These range from increased self-confidence to increased educational attainment, from social cohesion to reduced offending behaviour. The claimed positive effects of arts participation have been categorised and labelled in many different ways but include, among others, developing self-confidence and self-esteem, increasing creativity and thinking skills, improving skills in planning and organising activities, improving communication of ideas and information, raising or enhancing educational attainment, increasing appreciation of arts, creating social capital, strengthening communities, developing community identity, decreasing social isolation, improving understanding of different cultures, enhancing social cohesion, promoting interest in the local environment, activating social change, raising public awareness of an issue, enhancing mental and physical health and well-being, contributing to urban regeneration, reducing offending behaviour, alleviating the impact of poverty and increasing the employability of individuals.

Some of the claimed benefits derived from the arts, such as self-esteem, are primarily personal or individual benefits while others, such as developing community identity, occur at a community level. It has been suggested that those participating in arts programmes may accrue some benefits directly as a result of their participation. However, there are also less direct and more complex processes that are dependent on achieving intermediary outcomes. For example, people learn new skills and feel more confident as the result of participating in community arts activity, and this, in turn, may increase their employability.

Many of the benefits are interlinked, overlapping or even interdependent. For example, social capital is a term closely related to social cohesion and well-being. Definitions of social capital often refer to the existence of, and participation in, organised networks or groups and less tangible items such as social trust, civic co-operation, local democracy and group solidarity. Increased self-confidence is frequently suggested as an outcome of arts participation. It has also been suggested that participants develop creative as well as non-creative skills, such as communication or organisational skills. Attainment of these sorts of outcomes by individuals may represent progress towards harder social inclusion outcomes such as employment or education and are pertinent to this inquiry.

We are reminded of some ground-breaking arts projects that have broken down barriers and been vehicles for understanding and absolute transformation, such as Féile an Phobail in Belfast, Music for the Mind in my home county of Cork, or RTE's popular "Music Changes Lives" programme, which documented how the simple act of learning to play a musical instrument changed the lives of a group of young children. This is not to mention the well-reported benefits to community development and urban regeneration. Research suggests arts programmes and projects were highly effective in producing community development outcomes, namely, development of community identity, decrease in social isolation, improvements in recreational options, development of local enterprise and improvement in facilities. Furthermore, the process of creating, strengthening communities or developing social capital frequently generates the desire for social change.

Local community arts schemes, like so many of the other projects mentioned, play an important, almost unquantifiable role in the lives of so many. In times of crisis the services they provide are in greater demand. They deserve recognition, appropriate support and encouragement. That the Government intends to continue its assault on them is a shocking reflection on its idea of what counts for a society.

See this speech in context