Arts education - Optional or not at all is not enough

THIS is a great day for arts education in Ireland.

Education Minister Mary Hanafin will this afternoon officially open the new CIT Cork School of Music, a project that began in 1999 when the then education minister Micheál Martin announced a €13 million extension to the college.

This proposal was quickly dismissed as not being ambitious enough and plans for a new €60m facility were immediately announced. The vision represented by that brave decision has been made real today and those responsible deserve our gratitude. That gratitude can be best expressed by exploiting the opportunities offered at the school and encouraging those who would build others like it. It is a benchmark, one the whole country can be proud of. It is a tremendous statement of ambition but it is unfortunate that we cannot say the same about all of arts education in Ireland.