School children need to be increasingly exposed to the arts, according to a major Arts Council report published today.
However, Minister for Arts Martin Cullen said securing fuding for arts in schools would be more difficult in the current economic climate than it was in the past.
Points of Alignment, the report of the Special Committee on Arts and Education, was presented to Mr Cullen and the Minister for Education and Science Batt O'Keeffe today.
It makes five key recommendations on how to bring the arts to the country's 800,000 strong school-going population.
They include the establishment of a dedicated national arts-in-education development unit staffed by up to eight people, increased resourcing for existing programmes and the development of an arts-in-education website.
Arts-in-education involves artists of all disciplines visiting schools to present work and run projects in which they collaborate with young people.
It also includes visits by schools to galleries, theatres and arts centres for exhibitions, performances and workshops of all sorts designed to enrich the school experience of thousands of young people throughout Ireland.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Martin Cullen said exposure to the arts at an early age would benefit a person for life.
He said that securing funding for the report's recommendations "would not be as easy as it was in the past."
"We're in more difficult times. But we may look at existing programmes that are maybe not delivering what this programme could deliver," he said.
Olive Braiden, Chair of the Arts Council, said arts provision for young people was the "single biggest fault line in our cultural provision."
"Hundreds of thousands of young people for generations to come stand to gain if the strategic changes recommended in the report are made," she said.
The Special Committee on the Arts and Education was set up in 2006 with a brief to identify areas where the arts could be brought into schools and to recommend how this could be achieved.