Close to €400,000 is making its way locally from the Arts Council.
It’s part of a nationwide €7.3 million spend to 131 artists, arts organisations and projects through the Arts Grant Funding programme.
Barnstorm Theatre Company is getting the lions share of the local allocation with €171,000 for young people in the arts. Closest to that is Monkeyshine Theatre who get €116,000 for the same purpose. While Music in Kilkenny and the Historical Harp Society of Ireland have each been awarded €27,000 for music & traditional arts respectively.
Tullow Road Community Group is the only Carlow project in receipt of funds and it’s to the tune of €35,000 for arts participation.
However, a representative for one of the groups has been telling KCLR that the funding is down again on last year’s figure.
Barnstorm manager Vincent Dempsey says their share for 2020 its lower than the funding they previously received.
And he says, while they are always grateful for any Arts council funding there has been a downward trend in the figures in recent years outlining “To put it in context this is against a figure of €336,000 that we were receiving back in 2010, €177,000 is a reduction on the money we got last year which was €185,000 which in turn was a 40% cut on what we got the year before”.
