Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House for this debate. I wish to speak about why the arts matter to me. I had the privilege to be trained in the arts and education, as well as the privilege of being educated in the arts and performance and the arts in education. I know, through my training and education that the arts are our national legacy, national language and national identity. I have worked in the arts all my life. I have performed, written about, built, created and developed theatre, visual arts spaces, festivals, writer-in-residence programmes, concert series, children's arts festivals and community arts programmes. I have worked with writers, poets, performers and musicians; worked at the Helix at DCU and on the board of the National Concert Hall; and lectured extensively on the arts and culture in Ireland, Europe and the USA. My involvement in the arts is also one of the reasons, if the not the main reason, that I am a member of Seanad Éireann. No Senator, politician or Minister has a monopoly on the arts and neither do I.

The Minister has said that the arts are for everyone and she is entirely correct. More than that, the arts are about everyone. It is the right of all citizens to have exposure to the arts, to be educated through the arts, to be involved in the arts and to live better because of the arts. That is all I have learned in my 35 years working in the area. They are of the greatest value to society and to ourselves; they are immeasurable, unmatched and unparalleled. I am speaking today because of my knowledge, my training and, hopefully, through a moment of expertise and experience. Thousands of books have been written about the value of the arts. Hundreds and thousands of contributions political to the human self and society and the value they give, and there are thousands of political speeches on the topic. I do not intend to make another.

The Minister has a unique opportunity to propel the arts to the metaphysical level that technology is propelled onto. She has a unique opportunity to make the arts as important as trade, import, export - of which they have been great examples - to make them as important as health, education, and justice. Any Deputy or Senator in these Houses knows that the very thing they rely on when they are travelling abroad is the arts. The Minister has the opportunity, possibly the best ever, to articulate the unending importance of the arts. She has the greatest opportunity now to argue the case for points for music and visual arts on the leaving certificate curriculum alongside maths. She has a massive opportunity to pave a road for the arts to become an independent subject on our post-primary curriculum. However, the Minister's greatest opportunity now, because of the situation in which we find ourselves, is to argue loudly, articulately and convincingly for more capital funding for the arts and for the arts to be, justifiably, as well resourced financially as every other area around the Cabinet table.