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

The vast majority of artists in this country live in absolute poverty. Let us start with that reality. Garry Hynes put it well when she said:

I hate that the arts are so underfunded ... How proud we are of our artists but we're not proud enough to make the lives of the people who work in the industry better.

That is the reality. This level of funding simply will not impact on that in any significant way. To fail to acknowledge that the overall level of funding is still well short of what it was in 2008, when the arts were wrongly assaulted for an economic crisis they did not cause, shows a complete poverty of vision. That is my point. The minimum ask is that the entire €50 million, not a portion of it, should be retained. That would not even bring us to 0.6% from the abysmal 0.1%. It is retrograde. I have not even mentioned the 9% cut for the Irish language, which is unbelievably retrograde. It is a philistine failure to recognise the importance of this sector.

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