Bride Rosney, Bill O'Herlihy Communications (consultant for the Arts Plan)

The Minister's proposed review of the Arts Acts is very welcome, particularly when significant changes are planned in local authority structures and practices. This provides a unique opportunity to ensure a decentralised focus on the development of the arts. The two Ministers - Arts and Environment/Local Government - need to co-ordinate their legislation and guidelines. I would like to see each local authority being required to:

1) Have arts and heritage as a specific budget line.

2) Spend a designated percentage of its total revenue under this heading.

3) Appoint a full-time arts officer with necessary support resources.

4) Assign specific responsibility for the arts to one of the strategic planning committees (SPCs) due to be established by all local authorities. At the moment, the arts are not specified in the SPC guidelines, and this needs to be rectified.

The harsh reality is that in Ireland, local authority spending on the arts as a percentage of public spending is less than 15 per cent. In Scotland by comparison, it is 47 per cent and in Finland 64 per cent. We too must achieve this type of local spending - the arts matter in the community.

Martin Drury, director, the Ark National Children's Centre

I'm no legislator, but if I could sit close to the public servants drafting the new legislation, I might whisper a few things in their ears. For instance, if somewhere like the Ark has two addresses (Dublin 2 and www.ark.ie), doesn't it make sense for any new legislation to streamline the organisational framework for the support of the arts across, local, national and international structures? I might suggest that it's time to recognise that there is a whole series of arts "practices" which bend, intermingle, and out-race the traditional art "forms". These need to be legislated for rather than legislated out.

A child is always a citizen, only sometimes a pupil. We need to take account of children as citizens with distinctive needs, and additional claims (due to their developmental status) to those of adults. Let the Department of Arts legislate for the child as citizen, the Department of Education for the child as pupil, letting common sense dictate that structures need to be in place to ensure appropriate collaboration between the two.

Patrick Mason, artistic director, the Abbey Theatre

While any review of the arts and arts legislation is to be welcomed, my personal view is that this must prioritise the needs of artists and art forms, placing the ambitions of arts administrators much further down the line. I personally do not agree with the newly defined role of the Arts Council as a "development agency". Despite the council's ambitions, I do not believe that it has either the staff or the resources to successfully implement this remit.

I hope that this review will involve genuine consultation with the arts sector, and not the stage-managed attempts we have witnessed in the recent past. Naturally, I hope that representative organisations will have a large role to play in the review process, ranging from the Council for National Cultural Institutions to the Informal Theatre Forum, which the Abbey Theatre has assisted in facilitating. One might also hope for legislative change regarding the status of the National Theatre, clarifying the anomalous position which currently exists between the Arts Council and the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands.

Fiach MacConghail, cultural director, Expo 2000, Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment

Through my experience as the Irish commissioner for the Venice Biennale, 1997, Sao Paulo Biennale 1998, on the programme committee for Washington 2000 and now as cultural director of Expo 2000, I have learned that the most necessary requirement for the promotion of Irish art abroad is a cohesive inter-departmental approach. I would not agree that the Arts Council should be the only agency involved in the promotion of Irish art outside this country.

I think that any legislative review of the Arts Act should copperfasten this inter-departmental approach, drawing together not only the Arts Council but also the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. All of this expertise is required to ensure that Irish artists are exhibited abroad, in contexts suitable to their work. We need to keep artists and art forms at the forefront of our minds in this review, using the legislation to strengthen the Arts Council's formal role in the debate, without giving it exclusive rights in policy articulation.

Paul Johnson, choreographer

I am very excited about the opportunities for contemporary dance inherent in the provision of new arts legislation. At present, dance does not exist as an art form category, either in the 1951 act or the 1973 amendments. I believe this has acted as a barrier to the development of the art form and may account for the fact that choreographers are excluded from membership of Aosdana. Even now, the discussions regarding the expansion of Aosdana are centring on including dance within visual arts. The legislative review will allow debate on the necessity for including dance as a distinct category, recognising the expanding cultural contribution it makes nationally, and increasingly on the international stage.