This aim of this group is to bring together people working in the arts and creative industries in the Roscommon South Leitrim constituency. This includes all people who make their living wholly or in part in any sector of the arts: if in doubt consider yourself in!

At a recent meeting of Theatre Forum the Director of the Arts Council, Mary Cloake, made it abundantly clear that now is a very serious time for arts funding in Ireland, and we need to use any means to make the case for the arts (subsidised or not), at council and government level, or we will be looking at further serious job losses and disintegrating communities.

Following on from this meeting numerous arts workers around the country have established different groups based on constituency. We hope that as many people as possible join whichever group is applicable to them and we will then seek to engage with our TDs and Councillors before this year’s vital budget. For now, lets get these groups up and running and then we can focus on what we hoep to achieve collectively from our local and national government and how we will go about approaching them. This group will hopefully act as a forum for all of us to come together and get things happening!

I’d like to acknowledge and thank Gavin Kostick from whom we have ‘borrowed’ a lot of the text above and who was the first to get the ball rolling on this.

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