Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Creative Ireland programme is a high level, high ambition, five-year initiative, which aims to place creativity at the centre of public policy. The launch document for the programme identified ten actions for 2017, under five specific pillars and there has been significant progress on their delivery. The position is as follows.

Under pillar 1, my Department is finalising a draft of a Creative Children plan for the period 2018 to 2022 in conjunction with the Departments of Education and Skills, and Children and Youth Affairs and the Arts Council. I expect that will be launched later this year. With regard to pillar 2, culture teams have been established in each of the 31 local authorities and each local authority produced a culture and creativity plan for 2017. Each local authority is now in the process of drawing up five-year strategic creativity plans which will be published in early 2018. The first Cruinniú na Cásca was launched on Easter Monday with the theme inclusion and diversity and work is now under way to develop our approach to Cruinniú in 2018. A pilot scheme to assist self-employed artists who have applied for jobseeker's allowance was put in place by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection last June.

Under pillar 3, my Department is finalising a capital investment programme for culture and heritage and has worked with the national cultural institutions on their plans under the programme. Work is progressing on the preparation of a plan for Ireland to become a global hub for the production of film, television drama and animation in accordance with pillar 4. A unified international identity and communications programme for Ireland was rolled out under pillar 5. This includes a new portal website for Ireland, www.ireland.ie, which has been viewed more than 2 million times around the world.

A forum entitled, Culture, Wellbeing and the Creative Society, Building the Policy Agenda, will take place on 13 December in Dublin Castle. The forum will also be the platform to launch the European Year of Cultural Heritage in Ireland. The European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport will attend that conference. Huge strides have been made progressing the Creative Ireland programme in its first year and I look forward to building on this success in 2018.

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