Oireachtas Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation 28 April 2015
Orlaith McBride
Director, Arts Council
Chairman, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting the Arts Council to appear
before the Committee to discuss the potential for job creation, innovation and balanced
economic development in the creative economy.
I am Orlaith McBride, Director of the Arts Council. As members will be aware, the Arts
Council is the government agency for the arts. Our role is to fund and develop the arts, and
also to be an expert body, offering advice on the arts to government, to the Oireachtas and
to all state organisations.
I’d like to start by dispelling the notion that the arts are some sort of ‘luxury’ or add-on in a
society – available only to those who can afford them. We are all familiar with the
argument of the arts v hospital beds.
I feel obliged to do this, because the arts are so often overlooked as not being part of the
daily lives of all our citizens. And this is not true – in fact I would contend that the arts are so
integrated into all our lives that we almost take them for granted. Let me give you an
example: If I asked each member of the committee when was the last time you or someone
in your family ‘had an arts experience’, you might think of the last time you went to the
theatre or an opera.
But were you not reading a great book last night? Were you not listening to music on your
way to work this morning? Did you bring one of the children to piano lessons, or Irish
dancing, or ballet? Did you yourself not sing a song at a wedding, or in the local choir or
attend a rehearsal of the community drama group.
The point I’m making here is that the arts are completely embedded in our lives, and, in
Ireland. But we need to understand that the arts span a range of pursuits and activities, of
course they are about attending the National Theatre/Abbey or the Gate Theatre but they
are also about the local arts festival, performances on the streets of towns during summer
months for all to enjoy, the local drama group performing at the local arts centre, an artist
working with children in school or a memory project using music and song with older people
in a residential care.
The arts have social, economic and community benefit to our society and to all our people.
None of us for a minute believe that the main purpose of the arts is to support economic
development – we don’t enjoy the arts for the sake of the economy, we enjoy the arts, are
challenged by the arts, provoked by the arts, intrigued by the arts and enlightened by the
arts for ourselves. However there is much research and data to confirm that the arts
contribute economically in terms of job creation, economic impact on the local and national
economy as well as the powerful role they play in contributing to the perception of Ireland
internationally as a creative and innovative place to locate in terms of direct foreign
investment. The arts are a core part of how we live our lives but they are also a core part of
our economy.
We can prove this, and we’ve already done so repeatedly. In recent years we asked Indecon,
headed up by Dr Alan Gray, one of the most respected and rigorous economists in Ireland,
to assess the economic impact of the arts in Ireland. Here are some of the things his data
proved:

The arts provide significant direct and indirect employment in Ireland today.

The Arts Council's annual funding from the Exchequer alone supports more than
2,000 jobs, generating an annual turnover of more than €180 million with tax
revenues (in the form of PAYE/income tax, PRSI and VAT), to the Irish Exchequer of
€42 million.

The wider arts sector supports more than 20,000 jobs, and contributes more than
one third of a billion euros in taxes.

The arts also impact on the creative industries - including film and video, publishing,
advertising, software, radio and television, libraries, archives, museums and other
arts facilities -- contributing €4.7 billion to the economy and supporting 77,000 jobs.
At local level, we can see the arts providing and sustaining jobs. We are a part of the parish.
Your local arts centre, theatre, dance space, exhibition space, cinema or bookshop have real
people rolling up the shutters every morning, going down the town for lunch, using the local
post office, sending their children to the local school, buying homes etc.
We invest millions in touring the arts, so that people in different parts of the country can
see the great work made by our artists and arts organisations. When that happens, we also
help create jobs, hotel/B&B bed nights, pints are bought in the pub etc.
We work hard, and we’d like to think we work smart, with local authorities, and we have
done so for years. The first formal agreement between the Arts Council and a local authority
took place thirty years ago in 1985 with the appointment of the first county arts officer in
Clare. In the intervening years Ireland’s arts landscape has been radically transformed,
leading to a rich and diverse national arts infrastructure that is supported by both national
and local government.
A key feature of this development has been that responsibility for arts policy, planning and
implementation is now integrated into the corporate ethos and policy of local government
in Ireland. Over a 10 year period 2005-2014 we have invested a combined sum of €1 billion
in the arts. However, there is much more potential in our partnership and we would like to
find the optimum way of working together to demonstrate what our collective efforts can
yield. The recent Local Government Reform places social, community and economic
development as key functions of all local authorities. Local Authorities have recognised the
role the arts play in delivering on these functions and see the strategic partnership with the
Arts Council as critical to this.
In 2013, Wexford County Council commissioned a report by Dr Richard Maloney, UCC, Creative
Dividends – The Economic Impact of Wexford County Council’s support for the Arts Sector. Its
findings reveal that in 2012 Wexford County Council’s direct financial support for the Arts
Sector was €0.86 million. This generated:
o An overall economic impact of €9.35 million.
o 100.5 Full Time equivalent (FTE) jobs.
o €1.01 million in various taxes paid to the Exchequer.
o A further €0.34 million in indirect activity,
In 2012, for every €1 invested by Wexford County Council in artists, arts activities,
enterprises and organisations, there was an associated impact of €7.83 in overall economic
activity.
We also worked with local authorities on an arts element of the national internship scheme,
JobBridge. I am happy to say that a key element of the strand we brokered is that they are
genuine, high-quality, monitored internships. All of the arts organisations are very wellknown to their local authority arts officer. We understand from the Department of Social
Protection that the ‘arts strand’ has been a genuine success.
Festivals are the life-blood of tourism the length of the country, and the Arts Council funds
festivals in every county – all the major arts festivals, and 160 small festivals. We invest over
€3 million directly in what we call 'multi-disciplinary' festivals – in other words not just one
artform. When we fund festivals, big and small, right across Ireland, we help sustain jobs,
and generate new ones. Festivals are one of the key ways that a place can express a
distinctive sense of itself, where people say ‘this is what makes us special’.
Festivals also mean jobs. We know that 80 percent of overseas visitors state that culture
and heritage are motivating factors for their choosing to visit Ireland. People come to
Ireland in some significant measure because of our cultural ‘reputation’. Fáilte Ireland will
tell you that visitors seek a differentiated experience in an increasingly globalised and
homogenised world. Fáilte Ireland knows these festivals are vital to tourism, and that's why
they help market them so heavily. But the vast majority of them simply would not exist
without Arts Council funding.
The arts are at the heart of what makes Ireland distinctive. The distinctive and memorable
elements of a tourist’s experience are often bound up with culture and entertainment.
Especially when our climate is ‘unreliable’, it is critical to have high-quality cultural
infrastructure and programming.
Again, this is not just rhetoric or ‘marketing speak’; we have the hard data. We can show
you, for example, that the activity of Wexford Festival Opera has generated a total of €6.6
million of GDP in Ireland in 2012. The economic activity carried out by Wexford Festival
Opera has contributed to maintain 208 direct, indirect and induced jobs in Ireland, which
represents 20 times the staff of the organisation.
Spraoi in Waterford, we invest about €250,000 a year. Fáilte Ireland says it is worth a
minimum of €3 million to the local economy. That is one smart investment for the
Government through the Arts Council!
West Cork Music/Literary Festival: Arts Council invests €235,000. Return for tourism alone is
13,000 visitor bed nights, visitor spend of €1.5 million.
All of our arts organisations are businesses – enterprises – they have to be to survive. So
what about innovation? The TDs and Senators that make up this Oireachtas Committee are
probably a lot better qualified than me to judge, but I will say this: One of the first things
you learn in the arts is ‘The Show Must Go On’. What that means is, when you have a
shoestring budget, when your back is to the wall, when things are not going to plan, you
have to use all of your wits and cunning, think of new and better ways to make it all happen.
There’s another way the arts are an essential part of the jobs, enterprise and innovation
ecology, and that in the area of industrial strategy – attracting Foreign Direct Investment.
When IDA Ireland is in a tough competition with another country to attract an investment
that will bring with it many jobs, they will always cite our key advantage: a smart, welleducated workforce that is innovative, capable not just of thinking but of thinking ‘outside
the box’.
When the IDA presses home this advantage, the thing that gives them deep credibility is the
achievements of our artists. It makes sense to the president and chief executive of a Fortune
500 company that Ireland is full of creative, innovative people. Just the previous week,
perhaps, they may have read a wonderful book by an Irish writer, or went to see an offBroadway play by an Irish theatre company. Just this morning, perhaps, U2 were playing on
the car radio.
Other countries simply can’t compete with us when it comes to that job-creating narrative –
but they are trying.
Recently, Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, said that education in the arts is
more important than ever.
He said: “In the global economy, creativity is essential. Today’s workers need more than just
skills and knowledge to be productive and innovative participants in the workforce.”
He was very specific about it: “To succeed today and in the future, America’s children will
need to be inventive, resourceful, and imaginative. The best way to foster that creativity is
through arts education.”
The arts and especially designated cultural facilities are not unimportant elements in the
ecology of resources and amenities necessary to secure Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).
Attracting and retaining industry, and especially investment by multi-national companies,
are to some extent related to wider issues of infrastructure, environment, education and
cultural facilities. For example, the Carlow County Manager is on record as stating that the
creation of the magnificent Visual Centre and George Bernard Shaw Theatre played very
positively when Merck Sharp and Dohme was considering the location of its vaccine
development facility in Carlow.
I am proud to say that the Arts Council is not only shaping the arts now, but also thinking
about the future. We’re working with the Department of Education through the Arts in
Education Charter to encourage a lot more arts in education – to ensure creativity and
innovation at the heart of teaching and learning so that we are producing a workforce that
can compete globally in Ireland and for Ireland.
We can’t do it on our own, though – we need your help, and we especially need your
influence. We not only need to advocate the contribution the arts make to our society and
our economy, we need to place the arts and integrate the creative and imaginative into all
aspects of public policy making. The Arts need to be seen as central to and not separate
from all aspects of Government.