Offaly County Council Arts Office has opened its application process for a variety of grants offered to professional artists, communities, and festivals for 2025. Offaly County Council Arts Office offers a number of grant schemes to assist in the development and promotion of the Arts across the county. The grants include the Arts Acts Grants 2025, the Festival Arts Scheme 2025 and the Professional Artists Support Award 2025. The Arts Acts Grants are community based and designed to support Offaly voluntary arts organisations, schools, drama & musical groups, town bands, voluntary community groups intending to host arts events, performances, or projects taking place in Offaly in 2025. The Festival Arts Scheme is designed for festivals taking place in Offaly in 2025 that are either dedicated arts festivals or have a strong professional arts element to the festival. The Professional Artist Support Award offers a support scheme for professional artists in developing their arts practice over a number of categories.
The grant schemes fund many great projects every year. In 2024 the Arts Acts funded a variety of projects including the transition year musical of ‘All Shook Up’ by Colaiste Naomh Cormac, a series of enabling art sessions for clients of Dochas Offaly Cancer Support Group, Dance classes with Lisa Hogan at St Brendan’s Boys P.S. and the sell-out show ‘Rock of Ages’ by Tullamore Musical Society. Festivals funded under the Festival Arts award scheme in 2024 included Birr Festival of Music, Birr Vintage Week and Arts Festival, OFFline Film Festival, Scripts, Tullamore International Summer Organ Series and Tullamore Trad Fest. The professional artist support award funded a range of professional artists across the county in support of their practice, with the aim of encouraging professional artists to live and work in the county.
All the funding schemes are competitive, and applicants are encouraged to ensure that proposed projects are innovative and ambitious, and for the Arts Acts and Festival Arts Grants, that they provide maximum impact in the community within the objectives.
The deadline for the Arts Act Grants and Professional Artist applications is 20th January 2025 at 3.00pm. The deadline for the Festival Arts Scheme is Monday 17th February 2025 at 3.00pm. Please note that this year applications will be made online via submit.com.
If you wish to make an application through Irish please email arts@offalycoco.ie or visit https://www.offaly.ie/arts-and-culture-forms/
Further information on all of the schemes is available on https://www.offaly.ie/c/arts-grants-awards/ or visit https://offalycoco.submit.com/
The Arts Office welcomes queries and reminds potential applicants to read the guidelines carefully before applying. Email arts@offalycoco.ie