Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Did the Minister get an opportunity to read an apology by Mr. Colgan, the former director of the Gate Theatre, in the Sunday Independent, part of which stated that he thought the staff were his friends and that may have been his mistake?

For somebody who has an enormous reputation in terms of the work he has done in that theatre to have been so misguided in respect of what he felt were his freedoms to interact with the women who came forward must have been quite harrowing for them and deeply worrying. I suggest to the Minister that this is quite a crisis in the Irish arts and theatre. We do not know how pervasive it is in other areas of the arts. Maybe it does not really happen or maybe it happens on a wide scale. What we know about artists and those working in the arts is that there is always a huge amount of energy, passion and commitment - they are all the good things. However, when it goes wrong, as it seems to have in this case, how is the Minister going to create an atmosphere in which people going into that career can be resilient enough in respect of somebody who tries to speak to them in this way and gives them their marching orders as soon as they even attempt to challenge it? The matter is definitely extremely damaging to our national arts reputation.

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