. . . when the issues came up?

It is a shame so few people turned up, because the meetings, on the evidence of the Tallaght meeting, were well-run, by staff who had a firm grasp of the issues and asked incisive questions. Anne O'Connell says there was a "sameness" about the issues raised at the meetings, and on the evidence of Tallaght, there was even a sameness between these meetings and the Arts Council's Consultative Forum - to the extent that some of the same voices, particularly those of Martin Drury of the Ark and Declan Gorman of Upstate Theatre Project, dominated. Again, we heard the concerns that the Arts Plan not be evaluated in simple economic terms "like greyhound racing or outdoor holidays"; that the Department's priorities of arts and disabilities, arts and the Irish language and regional access should not mean that social issues replace aesthetic issues in policy; that there was no mention of arts and culture in the Good Friday agreement; and that the Department of Education be lobbied to get its arts act together (on this subject, one speaker volunteered an example from Britain, where children were exposed to classical music for 20 minutes every day, and ended up performing better across the board). The focus on local authorities was newer: Gina Kelly, arts officer with South Dublin County Council complained that it was discretionary, not mandatory, that local authorities allocate funding to the arts, and that there were too few structures to support the officer; Declan Gorman added that the arts department was viewed as the "colouring-in department" in some local authorities, and that the Arts Council should not be supporting them at all - the funding should be found from within their own budgets.