It is an honour to appear before the joint committee on behalf of the National Youth Council of Ireland and our working group, youth arts works, which is made up of a number of national youth arts organisations. I run the youth arts programme in the National Youth Council of Ireland. I am joined by Mr. Lee O'Neill from The Grainstore, Cabinteely, Ms Eimear Hurley, Cork International Girls Chorus, and Mr. Sam Riggs, Carlow Youth Theatre.
I will discuss the importance of young people in promoting arts, craft and culture. Young people participate in the arts in kaleidoscopic ways - they are members of youth theatres, orchestras, ensembles and bands - and do so through a soft infrastructure made up of practitioners, organisations, ensembles, skills and other supports. They participate in workshops, projects, plays, exhibitions and concerts. In addition to taking part as participants, they engage with the rest of the arts as audience members and critics and make their own work. There are also many young people involved in ensembles and schemes which they have organised themselves and which do not form part of any youth arts infrastructure.
Much of this activity, even where it is led professionally, is not for profit, if not completely voluntary, and therefore provides excellent value for money. However, as Emelie Fitzgibbon once said about voluntary youth theatres, what happens after charisma? In other words, what happens when the goodwill and passion run out? Money, too, is required. The funding lines to the arts in general and youth arts in particular are comparatively small.
It is generally agreed - much research is available to support this assertion - that the arts are a very effective and creative way of educating and learning. In addition, access to the arts for young people is important in its own right. It is, in fact, a right as Ireland ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991, one of which is the right to participate in the cultural life of the country.
The need for a more focused, cohesive and strategic approach to cultural provision for young people is recognised on a European level. The conclusions of the European conference, Promoting a Creative Generation, recommended to member states the inclusion of access to culture as one of the important priorities in all policies regarding young people. A resolution on a renewed framework for European co-operation in the field of youth acknowledged the importance of culture in the future and well-being of young people in Europe and lists creativity and culture as one of the eight main fields of action. I mention these developments to demonstrate that access of young people to culture is attracting a growing interest at all policymaking levels, from the international to the local level.
We are approaching a tipping point. Despite the difficult circumstances in which Ireland finds itself, we should not allow the cart to roll back down when we are so close to cresting the hill. Owing to the range of providers and access points to the arts, funding and resources run into youth arts from many different sources. We must consider the impact of all cuts, rather than viewing a single cut to the arts budget in isolation, if we are to assess the damage cuts will have to the soft infrastructure to which I referred. We are very concerned about the cumulative effect of many lights going out. What I mean by this is that in addition to a cut in funding to a youth theatre, a community may also experience a cut in the budget for arts in schools or to the arts programming budget for a local arts centre, library or youth club. Our concern, therefore, is that these measures will switch out many lights and our message is very simple - first, one should do no harm. The infrastructure, which in any case needs development, is easier to protect than to rebuild.
There are 1,140,616 people under the age of 19 years in Ireland. The figure is correct if no one has had a birthday since the statistic was calculated. It does not make sense to fail to make adequate provision for such a significant constituency. Despite making up 29% of the population, the young people's services category directly receives 5% of the Arts Council allocation. In addition, young people who are not yet taxpayers are already destined to spend much of their working lives providing the money that was necessary to rescue our banking system. It behoves us not to focus cuts in expenditure on those we wish to pay for mistakes which were not of their making. It does not make sense to focus unnecessary pain on those we will rely on as our exit strategy from the recession.
Providing access to the arts and an education is an investment rather than an expense. The solutions we will need are those that young people will invent. Imaginative, innovative thinking has never been more important to nurture.
Youth arts activity runs much of the time on passion and volunteerism, qualities that also provide a measure of wealth. The country finds itself in unprecedented difficulty and people rely more than ever on each other and their communities for support. Social cohesion and community coherence will be more important than ever as we seek to turn the country around.
Arts access for young people can feed the following benefits into society and communities as well as contributing towards the creative economy. Involvement in the arts assists young people to become more confident, resilient and content, which has a positive knock-on impact on society. Youth arts is a vital part of the larger spectrum of high quality art and creative endeavour which the world associates with Ireland and which must be a lived reality for our citizens as well as a characteristic we promote abroad.
Research commissioned by the National Youth Council of Ireland found that, among other benefits, 90% of the young people surveyed agreed with the statement, "I feel happier in myself since joining the project"; 92% of young people agreed with the statement, "I have more self-confidence since joining this project"; 83% stated that the arts project "helps them connect with their feelings and express them"; 90% agreed with the statement, "I've learned to work as a team"; and 98% agreed that they learned new skills from participating in projects, such as computer and technical skills and others such as putting on a production.
The Public and The Arts, an independent report, found that arts programmes and facilities dedicated to working for and with children and young people were identified as the top or second priority for more than half of those surveyed. In the same report, 69% of people surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that funding for the arts be maintained even in times of economic recession.
Besides having an entitlement to cultural access, young people benefit from participation in numerous ways, both in terms of hard skills, which can increase employment opportunities, and soft skills, which enable them to achieve their full potential and be engaged citizens. I do not speak only of quality of education or public provision but of quality of childhood, of which all of us only have one. Childhood does not wait. The eight, ten or 14 year old cannot wait for the recession to be over. The window closes on the particular needs and potentialities each child had at the specific moment in time.
Quality of childhood must include access to the arts. A report by the National Economic and Social Forum: The Arts, Cultural Inclusion and Social Cohesion, states that children are a particularly important grouping in the arts by virtue of, among other things, the developmental significance of childhood experiences. Some 86% of youth theatre members surveyed by the National Association for Youth Drama stated that youth theatre had the potential to change completely their lives.
Philip Pullman, the award winning writer of the trilogy His Dark Materials, states the following regarding access to the arts for children:
Children need to go to the theatre as much as they need to run about in the fresh air. They need to hear real music played by real musicians on real instruments as much as they need food and drink. They need to read and listen to proper stories as much as they need to be loved and cared for.
The difficulty with persuading adults that this is the case is that if one deprives children of shelter, kindness, food, drink and exercise, they die visibly, whereas if one deprives them of art, music, story and theatre, they perish on the inside where it does not show.