Apart from being an actor and director, I speak to the committee from the perspective of operating a company that does national tours with large-scale productions. A second agency of the company is involved in the education sector. It tours productions of plays from the second level curriculum for the leaving certificate. Funding comes from the Arts Council. The Department of Education and Science does not have or, at any rate, has never allocated funding towards that aspect of the education process.
I will address the issue of touring and its implications. Since 1996, we have probably opened more arts centres and theatre venues throughout the country than ever before. This has been very worthy and many of the centres are fabulous. It is thanks to the efforts of Members of the Oireachtas to a large degree that such centres have been opened. However, we must face a reality. We have built centres that are sometimes less than economically viable in their size and scope and that are sometimes in areas that do not have the critical mass to produce the level of audience that is required. More importantly, we have provided the buildings but we have not provided anything to put in them. There are centres and theatres throughout the country that have plenty of seats that could be filled but there is nothing to look at because we do not adequately fund touring theatre.
Why touring? Theatre depends on a critical mass of audience attendance to make it viable. One can put on a play for a week at a cost of €150,000 to €250,000 but in that week's box office one might take in perhaps €30,000. That is not viable, as anybody in any walk of life knows. We are familiar with that well used phrase, "There's no business like show business". The word "business" is used twice in that phrase but the word "show" is used once. It is a business. The practitioners of the theatre arts are as conscious of that as anybody. It is a business like any other, such as agriculture, that requires investment to generate activity.
The majority of theatre tours in this country tend to be worthy, good quality but very arty and usually consisting of one, two or three people. We cannot afford to tour the scale of production the residents of Dublin and Cork normally see, due to the density of population, and that Galway has developed due to the advent of Druid. The scale of production that the Abbey Theatre or the Gate Theatre might put on in Dublin cannot be seen by other growing centres of population. These centres are blossoming due to the fact that we have developed a policy of decentralisation and have allowed the regions to develop. Centres such as Waterford, Galway, Limerick and even Donegal, where there has been massive growth around Letterkenny, will never see the quality of main stage productions that can be seen in Dublin or Cork simply because we do not have the resources to make touring there viable.
There has to be a clear determination to fund touring adequately. I do not know how many members of the committee remember that 25 years ago we had the Irish Theatre Company, the national touring theatre. I was on the final board before it was abolished. That addressed the touring issue and main stage, high quality, large-scale productions could be brought around the country. I am not advocating its return. However, there is potential in touring. Where two or three elements are gathered together, be it theatrical managements in Dublin or a group of regional venues, and can secure a funding package that can make a production tour, the type of plays that people who live in Dublin and Cork have the advantage of seeing at the Gate or the Abbey or at the Everyman in Cork can be toured and make those venues and productions viable. Unless a degree of seed funding is allocated to touring, however, it will never happen and centres of population throughout the country will never get the benefit of it.
I wish to make a further point. I will use my theatre company as an example because I know the numbers. If a small theatre company, for example, Second Age Theatre Company, receives a grant which, until the major cutback of a couple of years ago, was around €157,000 — not a lot of money to run a company — it could put on one production a year, a major Shakespeare, with a total employment factor of approximately 25. With the small increase that was given last year of €20,000 we are now putting on two productions and we could put on about two and a quarter of the same scale. For another €25,000 to €30,00 a year, that can increase to three productions.
Each addition of that approximate amount of money means one can increase by a factor of 100% each time the employment potential and, therefore, the audience and revenue potential. Every time we put on a play 30,000 leaving certificate or second level students get the opportunity to experience live theatre. I am sure members of the committee will remember plays they saw when they were in their teens that had an effect on them, kept them going to the theatre and gave them a love of Shakespeare and of the art form. For every €30,000 the theatre company gets, another 30,000 children can go to see a play.
If that is applied to other companies, each small increment that is given, on top of the basic grant that keeps the administration running, potentially increases by 100% the number of plays that can go on the road, attract new audiences and create revenue that can allow more productions to be done. It is a rolling effect. The more plays we put on, the more money we take in and the more plays we can put on. It is a matter of the seed finance coming through.
