The new chairwoman of the Arts Council knows how unhappy artists are. She's keen to help more, she tells Belinda McKeon

It came as a surprise to many when Olive Braiden was named chairwoman of the Arts Council last August. Although she is widely lauded for her achievements as director of the Rape Crisis Centre, a position she held for 10 years from 1990, and for her work as a commissioner on human rights and family law, as well as for leading the Crisis Pregnancy Agency, she was not known for having a particular stake in the arts.

All but one of the other 12 people appointed to the council worked as artists or with arts organisations. The exception was Emer O'Kelly, the theatre critic, who had also been a member of the outgoing council. "Oh, where's she come from?" mimics Braiden, six months into her term, as she remembers her appointment - a surprise to her as much as to anyone, she says. "I didn't know anything about the Arts Council," she admits. "The only dealings I had with it was when I came up to Merrion Square to collect paintings it had given to the Rape Crisis Centre."

Compared with her other roles, all of which involved "down-to-earth work in difficult areas", the Arts Council appointment seemed like light relief. "I thought, oh gosh, that would be terrific, lovely, just the subject of it," she remembers. "But I had to reflect then, could I do it? Because I didn't understand the total complexity of it."

So why was she lobbied by the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, to take the post? One rumour was that hers was a Fianna Fáil appointment; she was, after all, approached to run as one of its candidates in the 1994 European elections. "I wasn't a party member then and I haven't become one since," she says lightly. "I'm a political person because I'm passionately interested in politics and how it works. I think the Minister was looking for a good chairperson, a good communicator."

Braiden's credentials in heading heavyweight boards and in working with voluntary organisations and Government Departments - not to mention in squeezing funds from them - are certainly proven. And, she says, she has a serious interest in the arts, coming from a Sligo family steeped in traditional music and song. She calls herself a "passionate attender" of long standing. She tells of her house, brimming with art purchased on her travels as she moved from country to country with her husband, an airline consultant.

She tells of her admiration for the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Eavan Boland and, later, of Mary Dorcey, who, she says, writes from the heart. She is enraptured by a Camille Souter painting that hangs in the office of Patricia Quinn, director of the Arts Council, and she is rereading with pleasure the works of Kate O'Brien, having last month opened a festival dedicated to her work in Limerick.

It's clear that her attitude to the arts is one of heartfelt, almost intuitive affection rather than of analysis or strategy - "I love to be surrounded by beauty," she says. Which makes her the ideal punter - but a policy maker, as she is realising, must take a slightly different tack. Her "huge pleasure" at working with what she describes as an amazing group - many of her colleagues are artists she has long admired - is one thing, but Braiden knows there is more to being on the Arts Council than loving the arts.

She loves, too, "to get an organisation and see what it is, what it is doing, and is it doing everything it should be doing?" And is the Arts Council doing everything it should be doing? The perception, says Braiden, is that it's not - since her appointment people have not been shy in telling her that they feel badly let down by 70 Merrion Square, by its communications system and by what they see as its mysterious, bureaucratic workings.

And it's not just from outside that the objections have come. "Those on the council who themselves got funding in the past all believed that the application process was too difficult - it was too difficult filling all the forms in - and that, while we have to be accountable, there ought to be a simpler way to do it," she says. "The Arts Council is there for artists; why wouldn't they know how it works?" As the date for the announcement of funding drew nearer this became the first priority of the new council: to communicate as much as possible, within the short time available, about the way grant decisions were taken.

In October, for the first time in its 52-year history, the Arts Council published its pre-Budget funding submission to the Government, revealing details of its request for €53.7 million. The same month it held a briefing at the Peacock Theatre to explain the decision-making process to organisations that had applied for funding. It was also, most likely, in October that the 19 per cent increase in funding from the Government - to €52 million from the previous year's €44 million, which had been an 8 per cent cut - was secured by Braiden's council.

She speaks of the worth of "a realistic pitch" and of the need to make clear that public money will be handled with care. "It's not enough, for all the work that we do, but it is a big sum, and it is everybody's taxes," she says. "So it really has to mean something to the public. I believe that the public should be able to get a sense of pride that their money is going to art." She describes her broad vision, in fact, as being to bring the arts to the people. "It's good for people to have themselves reflected in art and to have beauty around them. And I think it's very important for the Arts Council to be the conduit of that."

But for Braiden and her council, it seems, that conduit remains to some extent blocked, even in the wake of December's funding increase. As she remembers the short period at the end of last year during which the new council met and finalised the grant decisions, there is frustration in her voice. "It was a baptism by fire, two months into our term," she says. "And we did, afterwards, feel quite exhausted after the process and thought, gosh, that was a very short space of time in which to do that."

Understanding the reasoning behind each decision was not easy, she says. "I had all the paperwork, about how each one was arrived at, but I didn't get a real feel for it. You are really wondering how the decisions are made. Or how," she corrects herself, "we as the council make them." It's not quite a slip - understandably, just two months into its term the council would take a great deal of what she calls "recommendations from the executive" in making its decisions. But next year she intends the process to be different. The discussion will take place over several days, so the council is "more in control of the decisions, that we have more ownership of them, that we have everything we need this time."

The everything that the council needs, Braiden explains, consists of more information from the sector itself, more testimony, what she describes as an understanding from the community. If John O'Donoghue can be seen as a good listener to the arts sector, then so too should the Arts Council. "The council is all of one mind on this, that we want to listen to the heartbeat of the artist in all forms and that everything we do should reflect this. And, of course, the artists on the board understand this better: that we are just the workers and that we form our plans around the artists, not the other way around. If somebody comes to us with some new or wonderful idea, we ought to be able to look at that and say, that's terrific, we'll support that."

The logistics of this vision alone are intriguing. Even with the help of what she calls the council's fabulous executive staff, getting to know the views of each of the 375 arts organisations that applied for revenue funding last year will be no mean feat.

But what's more interesting are its implications for the council's beleaguered Arts Plan, launched in 2002 and intended to run through to 2006 but now seriously hampered by the demise of multi-annual funding, the assurance of which had formed its backbone. It's on the basis of the plan that funding decisions have been made for the past two years.

As she talks about a reversal of it, is Braiden signalling a move to a completely new set of criteria for funding? "I think that we should be more flexible," she says. "With MAF gone we need to look at a whole new way forward. We can't follow the steps of the Arts Plan. We've inherited it and it looks like, we don't know for sure, but like we'll need a new one."

But could this not, in itself, take until 2006 to devise? "We're thinking about what we're doing for this year," she says. "For now we have to think in yearly terms, because the Minister has made it clear that we are not going to get multi-annual funding." But what if the need for its return is what the sector turns out to be pleading for? "Maybe after another year or two . . . but certainly not this year," she says.

Her vision for the "yearly terms", however, sounds something like an informal version of multi-annual funding, the logistics of which, once again, would prove interesting to see in operation. Acutely aware of the damage done to the arts by the loss of the funding format, Braiden has in mind "some sort of a plan" - not an Arts Plan, she clarifies, just the council's own plan of action - "where we can say, well, these organisations can do this and this because we can stand over that, because we're working with them all the year, so we know how they're going."

January, she notes, was a month of "nothing to see in the theatre or anything", because so many organisations were awaiting funding; she wants to change this. "We should have some way of saying to people, well, you are going to get a certain amount. That we will be able to say, listen, you're guaranteed to get €100,000 or whatever." But isn't that dangerous? To build up confidence and then risk seeing it shattered by a nasty budget? It's the tightrope Braiden feels she and her council must walk; inviting the sector's trust in it while it places its own trust in the Government.

There's much of the counsellor about her still; a sympathetic, almost emotional response to a traumatised arts sector and a desire to see funding go where it's badly needed. It's a sympathy that may have to be blunted somewhat as the council sets about reconciling a generous vision with restrictive practicalities and as it works out its role as an agent of development and policy-making rather than simply a funding body - two tasks, Braiden admits, that still need to be tackled, that still need to be addressed by the council in one of the "brainstorming days" it uses to pool ideas. "There's a lot of hard work to be done," she says. "But we're determined to do it."