Now in its fifth year, the Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis has learned the hard way that you can't always rely on tradition for survival, writes Brian O'Connell.

What if you build it and they don't come? Five years ago, the Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis, Co Clare, was unveiled as the most significant arts initiative in the mid-west, and - at a cost of £6.5 million - the most expensive.

Billed as the centre for the performance of traditional Irish music, the 500-capacity, state-of-the-art theatre was to house an ambitious programme of traditional performances, mainstream and avant-garde theatre, national and international dance productions and visual arts exhibitions. With Riverdance coining it across the globe, it seemed Glór was in pole position to capitalise on the commercial "come-all-ye" factor.

Yet barely three years after its opening, Glór found itself with financial difficulties, dwindling audience numbers, seeming Arts Council ambivalence, and a realisation that traditional music in a large-scale concert setting was dead as doornails. Glór artistic director Katie Verling dug her heels in, shredded the original business plan and set about encouraging the local community to take more ownership of the venue.

Her hard work and dedication seem to have paid off, with Glór receiving €120,000 in Arts Council funding this year, an increase of more than 60 per cent on last year. Coupled with this, Clare County Arts Office received an extra €40,000 and the Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy received €80,000, placing Co Clare fourth in terms of national funding statistics. Glór's experience and that of the county as a whole, serves as an example to venue managers and local authorities throughout the country struggling to register on the Arts Council radar.

"When I first approached the funding issue," says Verling, "I was told by our board that we would never get any money and not to waste my time. The first year we got nothing sure enough, the second year we got 10 grand, 20 grand the next year, then 30, then 40, and finally this year we get a threefold increase. Our application to the Arts Council has been approached the same way every year - in it we set down a set of plans for ourselves. Previously it was an exercise in humiliation and degradation because at Christmas you heard you had failed. So all the plans couldn't come about, and there was very little feedback about the selection process."

FOR ITS PART, the Arts Council points to the fact that it lacks the resources to support the new breed of arts venues that have sprung up in the past decade.

Several more established venues, such as the Dean Crowe Theatre in Athlone, are struggling for survival of late, while the Abbey continues to colonise a large chunk of the Council's budget.

So what changed for Glór? "We worked very hard over the past few years," says Verling, "Last year we did a huge rethink. We had to. Five years in, the business plan we started out with had to be thrown out the door. I think originally we may have been naive in thinking that you could get big audiences for the traditional arts. There's an issue here of bringing coal to Newcastle!

"What I mean is that Clare has a surfeit of fantastic music, and I think one of the things we have tested is that Irish music began in the home and, from there, where it has had its greatest success was in intimate venues and pubs. Bringing it to a concert hall setting has never been entirely successful for a native audience, which is something we have learned the hard way. We now have a huge amount of experience under our belts - a lot of that has been negative experience, but it has been a huge learning curve."

At a time then when Glór openly acknowledges the difficulties facing traditional music in the county, the decision by the Arts Council to award Clare County Council and Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy the largest funding increases in their history, seems somewhat at odds. While the traditional arts in Co Clare have been further bolstered, there is a feeling that the performance and literary arts have suffered as a result.

The county lacks a writer-in-residence programme, annual arts festival, youth or professional theatre company, or purpose-built exhibition space.

County arts officer, Siobhán Mulcahy, sees her job as playing to the county's artistic strengths and helping create the impetus for non-traditional art forms to develop organically.

"For years we've been making the case that a lot of what we do is in the traditional arts, but that wouldn't be something that the Arts Council would necessarily have been funding. In terms of funding, we were mid-way down the scale. This year we are up by a third, and are now the fourth highest in the country. I felt that was an endorsement of the work we have been doing. It means that we can now consolidate our work, particularly in the area of the traditional arts."

GIVEN THE DIFFICULTIES Glór experienced, both in maintaining an audience and altering its programming remit, question marks have been raised as to whether the venue owes its existence more to Síle de Valera's political legacy (she was Minister for Arts and a Clare TD at the time), rather than any actual cultural needs. Mulcahy doesn't see it this way.

"I think that you need to put it into the context of the time. Clare didn't have an arts venue, so for a county very much steeped in the culture from a ground-up perspective, especially with the traditional arts, it was certainly justifiable. Other counties, who may not be as culturally active as here, had venues. It's also worth bearing in mind that the population in Clare is now more than 100,000. So I think for people like us, and also places like Portlaoise and Thurles, people felt that their county was getting its just desserts. The fact that the Minister was here helped, but it was long overdue."

That may be so, but were it not for the continued financial support of Clare County Council, Glór would have found it impossible to adapt and survive over the past five years. Should there have been greater support from the Arts Council? "I think the Arts Council signalled from an early point that they had concerns over who was going to pay for the running and support of these venues. There isn't any venue in the country making money, and I think they flagged that from the outset.

"But at Government level there seemed to be disparity from what the department wanted - a capital building programme - and what the Arts Council wanted. It's not that they didn't want counties to have venues, but I do think they were marking people's cards.

"There is a huge question about sustainability, not only about Glór, but about every arts centre in the country, and really, you have to look at the logic of a new building going up and not having the money or resources to staff them. Having said that, Glór has found a way to alter its programme radically and give people access to a lot more performance arts and non-traditional art forms. But these things take time to establish, given that we are about 20 years behind most other counties in terms of cultural infrastructure. But the landscape is changing, thankfully."

For details of Glór's programme see www.glor.ie