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

We need to realise that we are in a bad situation. It is against a background where this country's international reputation rests to a large extent on the reputation of our artists, musicians, writers, actors, theatre producers and so on. Despite this, we spend a miserable 0.1% of GDP, the lowest in Europe, on the arts. The Minister provided a miserable €5 million increase in the arts budget recently. The consequence for artists is that 80% of them are in precarious jobs and 60% earn less than the average industrial wage. On average, workers in the sector earn less money and work fewer hours than others and the average wage is something like two thirds of the national average. We treat artists and workers in the arts with contempt. I do not see how the miserable increase in funding in the budget will do anything to address that.

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