Oireachtas Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation 28 April 2015

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:

• An overall economic impact of €9.35 million.
• 100.5 Full Time equivalent (FTE) jobs.
• €1.01 million in various taxes paid to the Exchequer.
• 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 well-known 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, well-educated 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 off-Broadway 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.