Ciara Conway (Waterford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the issue of a small amount of money that has a huge impact on Waterford every year. The Imagine arts festival is a special festival which is relatively small in scale but by no means lacking in programme events or community participation. The festival runs every October for ten days. It was founded in 2003 and has grown in scale and content since then. It is very much a community-based festival and represents everything that the arts should be about. It is focused on access to the arts and getting young people, in particular, involved. It has an interesting and varied programme of events including live music, dance, theatre, visual art and plenty of spoken word such as comedy, literature and story telling . There is a very strong children and youth programme and lots of the local schools are involved.

My party colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, and I visited the Waterford youth arts building last October and we were delighted to meet young people who were working hard on their pieces for the Waterford Imagine arts festival. A big feature of the festival last year was the parade of light, which was very symbolic. Lots of schools from across Waterford city were involved in making lanterns and taking part in the parade. Local school children making things and taking part in a parade is the essence of a community arts festival. Imagine involves people of all ages and brings the community together in celebration. The festival promotes established and emerging artists on the local, national and international scene. Ticket prices are kept low so that as many people as possible can take part.

Two weeks ago the future of the festival was thrown into doubt when it was revealed that the Imagine arts festival would not receive any money from the Arts Council in 2015, representing a cut of 100%. Imagine was in the small festivals category and received just €11,000 last year but was very glad to receive that money. This is not just about the €11,000, although that is very important; it is also about the fact that Arts Council funding lends legitimacy to the work of the festival and its 42 volunteers.

These include the festival board, the music committee, the John Dwyer trad weekend committee, the Imagine visual arts committee, the parade of light committee the film committee, the dance committee. There are many committees and considerable time is given up for free for the love of arts and for the love of including young people in the arts scene in Waterford. All of these people give of their time and work hard throughout the year to make the festival a great success. It defies belief that last year this was one of the few festivals to get a small increase in funding from €10,000 to €11,000 and this year it has gone to zero. It makes no sense. It has been funded for the past 13 years. Last year AOIFE, the Association of Irish Festival Events, recognised this festival as the overall winner in best-marketed festival of the year. It must have been the best marketed around the country, but not to the Arts Council which could not recognise what a great offering it represented for Waterford. It received an estimated €700,000 in value of PR from local and national media in 2014 and was very positive for the image of Waterford. The festival brochure was launched by Waterford man and editor of The Irish Times, Mr. Kevin O'Sullivan. The decision to the cut the funding means there is now no arts festival in Waterford. To put it in context, the Clonmel Junction Festival receives €90,000 in funding; the Kilkenny Arts Festival receives €400,000 in funding; while the Wexford International Opera Festival receives a whopping €1.5 million. What does Waterford receive? We did receive €11,000 but now it is gone, which is not good enough.

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