Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Poverty of vision was a fairly apt description of the budget as a whole. It was just scraps here and there. Nowhere is that phrase more apt than in the area of arts, which is about vision. It is true there was a small increase in the allocations for certain agencies and institutions over and above last year. That has been welcomed by those institutions. We had a lengthy debate in here. The Minister knows that the National Campaign for the Arts has asked for much more than that. It asked specifically that the €50 million - not €18 million - that was provided on a once-off basis be retained in full to begin to move us even in a small way in the direction of European average levels of spending in the area of arts. We have a pitifully low level in a country whose revolutionary tradition was infused with the vision of artists who would turn in their graves if they thought the celebration of that cultural tradition was a once-off event. It should be about seriously ramping up the investment in our artists, not just in some institutions but in the artists and the arts generally.

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