REVENUE AWARDS

What we call REVENUE funding incorporates those larger arts institutions and organisations which deliver arts programming all-year round, right across Northern Ireland. They include the Riverside and Ardhowen theatres in Coleraine and Enniskillen respectively; arts centres in each of the 26 borough and district council areas, such as Flowerfield in Portstewart and Clotworthy in Antrim.

And there are also arts sites which serve particular interests, such as Tí Chulainn in south Armagh which is an Irish-language cultural centre, the Playhouse in Derry City which is a flagship community arts facility, and the BEAT Initiative in east Belfast, which organises the annual Belfast Street Carnival. The PRISON ARTS FOUNDATION has its own programme which we fund; as does the ARTS & DISABILITY FORUM.

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The map is colour-coded for Creative Arts, which includes visual arts, literature and traditional arts. Among the public art galleries we fund are the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast and the Context Gallery in Derry City.In Performing Arts, which includes music, drama and dance, we fund the Grand Opera House in Belfast, and such independent theatre companies as Tinderbox, Kabosh, Prime Cut, SHANKILL THEATRE COMPANY and Big Telly Theatre Company based in Portstewart.The percentage of our funding which goes towards Community Arts stands at 9.6%: and that is only our dedicated Community Arts budget of £662,000. If you were to include the outreach programmes the Council funds in other non-community arts-specific organisations, the figure would be up to around 12%. The Community Arts budget is larger than the Visual Arts budget. It’s actually larger than the Literary Arts, Traditional Arts and Education budgets put together. This emphasises the extent to which the Arts Council has committed itself since 1979 to developing creative practice among all our communities.We fund the arts festivals in places like Omagh, Ballymena and Downpatrick, the Dungannon Disability Arts Studio, the Belfast Community Circus, the Nerve Centre in Derry City and Moving On Music, an organisation which brings the best of jazz and classical music right across Northern Ireland.These revenue-funded organisations are the life blood of the arts in Northern Ireland. Many receive additional support from local government, or perhaps from other funding sources in Europe. But for their day-to-day running in Northern Ireland they are dependent entirely on Arts Council support.

There are 207 of them. They are employers, they are training grounds for high achievement in all forms of the arts, and they are the organisations which tell nothing but good news about Northern Ireland to the rest of the world.