County Galway has long been associated with the arts and culture, with our unique quality of life and natural landscape offering artists the type of environment for creativity to thrive. Underpinning the support of our creative community is a responsibility to ensure we preserve our landscape, our built and natural heritage to attract further development and ensure that the factors which are so conducive to creativity are preserved.

We see culture and creativity as an essential component for communities to thrive and understand that creativity is the foundation of innovation, the most coveted skill across all areas of life in the 21st Century. Our 2019 programme focused on cross collaboration between our Culture Team and beyond. Our Pop up Poetry for ‘lil Peeps with Branar is a two year project which will support the commissioning of new Irish Poetry for children aged 0-4 years to include a publication, performance and podcast of the original work in 2020. Our other key projects included Reading the Landscape a heritage project with Zena Hoctor using a Heritage Audit Toolkit to train local groups to develop their own local heritage fieldwork.