I thank the chairman. My name is Ms Mary Nash and I am accompanied by my colleague Mr. Seán Ó Móráin. I carry the brief for arts, film and music in the Department, as well as EU presidency co-ordination. Mr. Seán Ó Móráin will deal with the arts capital schemes. I thank the committee on behalf of the Department, Mr. Ó Móráin and myself for the opportunity to address it. Since its formation on 1 June 2011, the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, in conjunction with the Department, has actively engaged in promoting the benefit of arts and culture to the wider community throughout the country. Our mandate seeks to promote access to, and participation in, the arts by all sections of Irish society and to support our national cultural institutions in their work to preserve, protect and present our heritage and cultural assets.
We sent a brief to the committee a few days ago and that documentation describes what the Department's arts division does. It covers a wide area. Instead of going into all of that, however, I have selected two initiatives in which the committee would be interested, based on its deliberations to date. The first is the national interactive strategy, published last year, and the second is Culture Night.
When the Minister, Deputy Deenihan, commenced in the Department, he announced a new interactive approach in the area of arts, culture and film. The kernel of the new approach was a proactive consultation process with arts practitioners at local authority level on their requirements and ideas for their sector. These consultations continue to feed into policy making for the sector.
The Minister selected one county, Kerry, as a template for all other counties. The Department, in conjunction with Kerry County Council, developed a template for this process which is available to all local authorities, should they wish to use it. The output of the strategy was two-fold. One part involved direct interaction with arts practitioners by the Department and the local authority. This element was as much about the Government engaging directly with arts practitioners at local level as an attempt at a coherent joined-up approach to the services delivered by the Arts Act 2003 at local government level.
In general, we found that arts and culture practitioners were somewhat isolated and they reported they felt they benefited from the consultation process with the Department and the arts office, as well as from interaction with each other. The vast majority of the proposals submitted by arts practitioners, curiously, were not for funding but for other types of supports. In some cases, the supports they sought were already available but they did not know about them.
The other part of the output of the strategy is an enumeration which is contained in the table at the end of the brief provided to committee members. It shows the funding to the arts in Kerry in 2010 from all sources for capital and current funding. I suggest members concentrate on current funding to gain a more balanced picture of the funding environment as capital funding tends to be lumpy and unrepresentative. The figures attempt to capture benefits-in-kind such as the waiving of rates for arts by local authorities. Arts organisations do not have to pay rates but local authorities still work out how much they should have paid, and it is a benefit-in-kind. In one or two cases, there is also the issue of rent foregone.
The list provided to committee members gives totals of the grants made, all of which are listed on the Kerry County Council website. The committee will also receive figures from the Arts Council but these only refer to the grants made and do not list salaries or the cost of running an arts office. The strategy also lists the art works that are held in public spaces, many of those in Kerry being Pauline Bewick's works in the library in Killorglin, and it also lists the infrastructure, such as theatres and public spaces available to the arts.
As the committee will be aware, the Department funds most of the national cultural institutions, including the National Gallery, the National Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Crawford Gallery in Cork. Entry to these institutions is free. In general, however, the visitors to these institutions are not drawn from the socially or economically disadvantaged. This is a crucial piece of information in that, clearly, barriers exist for the socially disadvantaged but they are not economic barriers since entry is free. Of course, it can also be argued a significant proportion of the population which is not disadvantaged do not visit arts and culture facilities.
This leads me on to second initiative I want to highlight. Culture Night started in 2006 and has grown to be a great success. The designation of one night allows an almost universal focus to fall on arts and culture. It re-forms the public imagination into a captive audience for one night each year, compliments of the print and broadcast media. The Government initiative concentrates its efforts on encouraging key artistic and cultural organisations to participate in towns and cities and to extend their opening hours until 11 p.m. to provide the public with increased access.
The 2011 event was the largest to date, with 30 towns, cities and counties across Ireland taking part. Private commercial art and culture organisations have become involved. Last year we had commercial art galleries reporting an increase in sales following their participation in Culture Night. On Culture Night people arrive who have never visited arts and culture spaces and some of them come back. I am sure most committee members have been involved in Culture Night events over the past six years and I hope they will agree there is a shared sense of enjoyment of the evening. I believe the single targeted focus that is made possible on Culture Night, aligned to the simplicity of the concept and the title of the initiative, has the potential to break through many of the barriers and preconceptions surrounding arts and culture. The 2012 event will be on Friday, 21 September.
The event called Music Day - Love Live Music takes a similar approach but it is a more recent initiative which is still developing. This year the event falls on 21 June, which is also international music day. The focus on this day is live music and people are encouraged to either perform themselves or attend a live music event.
I would also like to refer to Culturefox, which I hope all members have on their apps. If not, they should come to me afterwards and I can explain how to access it. It is free to all arts and culture event organisers, as well as users. It demonstrates the use of social media and technology to bring the arts to all levels of society. Public funding of the arts and culture has been substantially reduced over the past few years. With less money, there is added necessity to seek initiatives that assist all arts and culture practitioners. It is a project that exploits the productivity that can be extracted from the rapidly changing technological environment.
I should also mention that a number of the cultural institutions I referred to earlier continue to undertake programmes which seek to reduce barriers to access for social disadvantage. The National Museum has an interesting initiative with an inner city school, Larkin Community College, known as Moving Statues and related to the monuments and statues on O'Connell Street. I know there are other issues which have arisen at committee but I will conclude at this point and allow the committee to direct the discussion.