Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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242. To ask the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht the State’s contribution to cultural services per capita in comparison to the rest of the EU 28; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [43371/17]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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Funding allocations made available to my Department are published each year in the Revised Estimates Volume with the outturn published in the Annual Appropriation Account.

The 2017 allocation to Arts, Culture and Film Division of my Department is €158.261m. The 2018 allocation to the Arts, Culture and Film Division is €167.301, an increase of 5.7% on the previous year.

Most of this is allocated to the agencies under the aegis of the Department, including the Arts Council and Film Board, however, this does not represent all expenditure on the Arts in Ireland.

Expenditure on the arts in Ireland comes from multiple sources, both public and private, including from other Government Departments.

I understand that the CSO does not produce national statistics that capture the totality of this expenditure on a per capita basis.  Recently however, EUROSTAT published figures for expenditure on cultural services across the EU in 2015 (as a subset of a broader category of expenditure on Recreation, Culture and Religion).  This indicated that expenditure on Cultural Services in all 28 member states was EU €66,133 million in 2015 while the equivalent figure for Ireland was €580 million.  This in turn would suggest a per capital spend in Ireland on this sub-category of €125 per head of population as compared to an EU 28 average of €130 per head of population.

However, it should be noted that my Department is engaging with the CSO in relation to the returns which Ireland makes regarding cultural expenditure to EUROSTAT to ensure that they are robust and comparable with data from other Member States covered by EUROSTAT. In this regard, the Department will be carrying further research in the coming period on expenditure on culture in Ireland.

Details of the EUROSTAT tables are at this link: .