Arts policy in Ireland in 2025 was shaped by a significant change at the very top of the pile.
After the Green Party’s exit from government, Catherine Martin was replaced as minister for culture in January by Patrick O’Donovan of Fine Gael, who soon made clear there was a new sheriff in town.
Confronted with a simmering scandal about a disastrous IT-modernisation project at the Arts Council, O’Donovan made no secret of his lack of confidence in the State’s main funding agency for culture.
The new computer system, intended to streamline grant administration, had absorbed millions of euro without producing a functional outcome. When the scale of the collapse became clear, the Minister’s language hardened further. He spoke of “fundamental questions about governance”.
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A full external review was ordered; the council’s director, Maureen Kennelly, was refused an extension to her contract; finally, the council’s 2026 funding allocation was frozen at 2025 levels.
Talking subsequently to The Irish Times, Kennelly did not shy away from the politics of her departure, saying that she believed the Minister had seen “the opportunity for a scalp” and that she was “a very easy target”.
Kennelly, who is now chief executive of Druid theatre company, described being flabbergasted at the public release of selective minutes of a meeting, and insisted the IT project was “inherited” – a troubled legacy she had attempted to salvage.
The review has yet to be completed, but when it is it might shed interesting light on processes and decision-making not just at the Arts Council but also at O’Donovan’s department, which was also subject to another of the confusing name changes that have afflicted it ever since its establishment, more than 30 years ago.
This time it switched from Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to Department of Culture, Communications and Sport, which at least has the virtue of (relative) brevity.
Film and television policy also reflected a cautious official mood. Production incentives continued, but the long-discussed levy on streaming services to fund the local industry was rejected.
O’Donovan was unequivocal: “I don’t see any reason to put a levy on them at the moment,” he said, adding that “people that are paying for entertainment – whether it’s the RTÉ television licence or whether it’s the subscription to Rakuten or Netflix or Disney – are quite frankly paying enough”.
Public-service media remained discombobulated. RTÉ continued to face governance difficulties and financial strain, and the Minister adopted a firm but narrow approach to its reform. He focused on compliance and regulation rather than articulating a broader vision for public media.
Proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Act will require RTÉ and TG4’s digital output to be held to the same standards as their linear broadcasts – a move that should have been made more than a decade ago.
But as Coimisiún na Meán’s five-year review of the sector showed, traditional public broadcasters will need to make much more radical changes if they are to remain relevant.
Taken together, these developments produced a year defined by caution, scrutiny and stalled momentum. Rather than expanding cultural policy or setting new priorities, the Government was preoccupied with governance failures, regulatory tightening and budgetary concerns.
All of which is essential, of course. But for a sector accustomed to operating on tight margins, 2025 was a year spent waiting: waiting for the Arts Council review, waiting for clarity on RTÉ.
O’Donovan’s combative posture may have led to uncertainty in the sector, but there was a widespread welcome for his announcement that the pilot Basic Income for the Arts scheme, which is due to end in early 2026, will be followed by a permanent project along the same lines.
The scheme, which over the past three years has been paying 2,000 artists €325 a week to enable them to spend more time on their creative work, has been an imaginative response to low incomes and precarity in the creative arts.
There is still much to thrash out about how an ongoing basic-income scheme will actually operate. Given the budgetary realities, some version of the lottery system used in the pilot, along with some sort of time limit on participation, seems likely.
There is one glaring reason why such initiatives are so badly needed in Ireland. The housing crisis has had many negative effects on society, of course. But culture often functions as a canary in the coalmine. And the point of the canary is that it’s the first to die.
The cost of accommodation and the related problems of dereliction, urban decay, property speculation and rent-gouging have hollowed out Irish towns and cities, slashed the number of venues and generally made Ireland a cold place for culture in all its forms, from clubs to exhibition spaces to theatres and concert halls.
The trend was hammered home near the end of the year by news that the Complex in Dublin, a rare example of an imaginative multidisciplinary space, faces potential closure in the new year. In a world atomised and alienated by digital technology, that is storing up problems for the future.
Politics alone may not resolve these problems, but the problems are deeply political nonetheless. The fate of the Complex now hangs in the balance, with a decision on funding a purchase of the venue resting with three Cabinet members: O’Donovan, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers and Minister for Finance Simon Harris.
Thoughts that Irish culture’s relationship with politics is particularly fraught can be dispelled with a brief glance across the Irish Sea, where the BBC – arguably the UK’s most significant contribution to modern global civilisation – faces sustained assaults on its integrity from ideological opponents and commercial rivals.
These are to be expected, but when they’re joined by the White House and an enormous lawsuit from Donald Trump, in response to a misleading edit of what he said before the attack on the US Capitol of January 6th, 2021, a new threat level has been reached.
From an Irish perspective, British broadcasters have probably been more important for the development of Irish writing, performing and film-making talent than their home-grown equivalents. Damage to the BBC doesn’t stop at the UK’s borders.
As for Trump, Maga’s culture war intensified with slash-and-burn assaults on public radio and television, renewed enthusiasm for book-banning and a striking contrast between the call from JD Vance, the US vice-president, for more free speech in Europe and his administration’s intimidation and harassment of broadcasters and comedians who dared to disagree with it.
The fusion of all these strands in one single tragicomic apotheosis came with Trump’s annexation of the Kennedy Center, a rather staid Washington, DC, institution that now finds its staff fleeing, its programmes strangled and its new board relentlessly attuned to the needs of the leader rather than the institution.
The result is a curious hybrid of political theatre and cultural demolition, creating a place where the primary qualification for influence is proximity to power.
The Kennedy Center’s mission has narrowed to accommodate a worldview that treats culture as a battlefield on which loyalty must be performed. If ever there was a cautionary tale for our times ...
