The job of arts management is not far removed from the world of big business, except for the money, Rory Concannon, outgoing CEO of the Dublin International Film Festival, tells Peter Crawley

For a long time, Rory Concannon found himself on the receiving end of a bizarre accusation. "People would keep saying to me, 'my God, you're such an engineer'," he frowns. Throughout a successful career in the arts management, evenly divided between theatre companies and film festivals, it was never something he was comfortable with. After all, Concannohad scraped through his engineering degree in Galway (where he was continually distracted by having to organise and promote events) and Dundee (where he retreated for his final year, hoping to avoid such distractions).

With his first job, however, working for Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo, he left the mathematical and physical sciences behind - or so he thought - and quickly become company manager; a promotion, it seems, from company dogsbody. The gulf might have widened when he became manager of the Cork Film Festival and then marketing director of the Abbey Theatre or, most recently, CEO of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (JDIFF). Old habits die hard, however, and Concannon can finally reconcile his attitude to that of a born engineer. "It has definitely helped me in terms of problem-solving," he offers. "Just coming at things from different angles." His description of engines, moreover - "Very complicated machines that come together. Lots of different parts. And something just makes it work." - could easily serve for any of the organisations he has assisted, organised and guided.

When we meet on a bright morning in Dublin's Temple Bar, Concannon, who is to step down as JDIFF's CEO after four years, is carrying a huge organiser and diary. Its pages are dense with scheduled appointments and tasks, most of them struck through with a defiant red line; anything not achieved is simply moved onto the following page. "I'm very disorganised," he says, in an energetic delivery, which, for more than two hours, never flags. "I have one organisation, which is forward momentum. And that's it. I've never been disciplined."

Concannon rarely refers to what he does as arts management - "No one really manages the arts," he says at one point - and speaks instead of "arts facilitating". He will describe himself as a pragmatist; although to hear him speak of Blue Raincoat (whose director, Niall Henry, he credits for instilling in him a "driven passion for the arts"), or the Cork Film Festival (for which he negotiated title sponsorship from Murphy's), or even the optimism he had for the Abbey under Ben Barnes ("It was a house full of huge talent," he says diplomatically, "and the Brownian Motion just never actually burst out.") he comes off more as an incurable idealist.

He is certainly fearless. Late in 2002 he left behind a highly paid executive position at the Abbey, where, he says, he could have spent a decade treading water, to set up the first Dublin International Film Festival with festival director Michael Dwyer. Interviewing prospective staff, Concannon told them that they had no money, no bank account, no office and no board. "But I hope to have all that sorted by next week," he would say. "Do you want the job?" They also had just four months to get the festival up and running. "If this works out," he told his wife, by way of explanation, "can you just imagine achieving that in four months? You can't buy that. All the money or titles in the world can't give you that satisfaction - if we pull it off." They pulled it off.

When the organisation was less than a year old, Concannon made headlines by publicly appealing the festival's revenue grant offer from the Arts Council. In what many saw as an endorsement of the festival, and a recognition of the event's success, its grant had risen by 52 per cent, from €25,000 in 2003 to €38,000 in 2004. "It's not about the amount of money," Concannon said at the time. "My only issue is to make sure that all organisations are treated in the same way when deciding who gets what. If they are, then fine. If not, then we must address that." The Arts Council, which has never offered detailed assessments to its client organisations when making grant decisions, can often appear inscrutable and unaccountable, but few have ever quibbled with an apparently favourable offer.

"The arts is a funny thing," Concannon begins, when asked about his dealings with the Council. "The sum of the parts involved in a thriving arts organisation don't add up. There's no way they can do what they're doing on paper. If you were to be in a normal business environment, and you added up everything that's there, all the people, everything that they do and what it equals, you'd just go, that's impossible . . ."

The extra element, he says, is passion. "Then you get an organisation like the Arts Council, whose fundamental raison d'être is to support and facilitate these organisations through financial means. Again, on paper, that's an amazing thing. But when you have a big bureaucratic organisation, the passion and understanding can't be there for a lot of reasons. And I've always found there to be communication problems between arts organisations and the Arts Council."

There are echoes of the engineer's love of propulsion in Concannon's impromptu job description: "I would see the arts job as very much about progressing on all fronts as beautifully and as quickly as possible." There is also a huge sense of impatience. An extremely engaging speaker, Concannon is in constant motion, his hands always animating a point, his cigarettes lit in quick procession, his coffee almost untouched. Lasting over four years, his association with JDIFF is one of his longest. "It's not that I jump around a bit," he says, "but . . ." He doesn't finish the sentence.

ONE OF THE most remarkable features of JDIFF is its sponsorship arrangement with Jameson, which supplied €40,000 to the film festival in its inaugural year, and currently contributes €600,000 to the festival each year, making it the biggest commercial sponsorship in the State. (The Arts Council's grant now stands at €105,000.) "Our relationship with Jameson didn't happen overnight," says Concannon. "It was a long build and a long development."

Such stability, however, seems an exception to the rule: the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Belfast Festival at Queens, for instance, have both lost major sponsors in recent years. Are there consequences to that kind of commercial investment "On that level, of course," he replies. "In the current structure that we have in the festival there would be consequences. Basically, there's not a balanced funding structure at the moment."

There are three legs to the festival's funding structure, he explains: the audience, the commercial sponsors and the state sponsor. "That's a very balanced structure. A three-legged stool is one of the most stable structures going. Now, granted, if one of those goes you're in a little bit of trouble." Another consequence, he admits, is that the festival may be seen as a very commercial organisation. "I find that very frustrating," he says, his cigarette flicking and his passion flaring. "Of course it's fucking commercial! Hello! Everything in the arts is commercial. Everything.Michelangelo! Do you think he painted for free? No. Whether he just got a meal, he was still remunerated for his work. Picasso got paid very handsomely for his work. [ John] Brack didn't, but he was a better painter. Everybody got paid. The Bard wrote a play, he got the door. It is commercial."

As Concannon prepares to depart the festival, now under the direction of Gráinne Humphreys and yet to appoint his successor, DIFF is in a healthy position; its audience hugely expanded, its association with Jameson secure and its turnover in the region of €1 million. The organisation, he thinks, needs new blood if it is to go up another level. "If things for me start to stagnate or become in any way repetitive, it's time to go and find another challenge."

This isn't just talk. Concannon's new venture is to develop an eco-hotel in Connemara, the Delphi Mountain Resort and Spa, due to open in April 2008. At a cost of €18 million, the project aims to be carbon neutral, generating its own energy, incorporating 100 per cent recycling and treating its own water. "It's basically trying to develop a 360-degree ethical business, as much as we can," he says. "We're never going to be perfect. But if I can go as far as I can on that and yet remain commercial, I'll be a very happy man. I'll have proved the commercial case for developing and building in this way."

In the arts world, some are bound to see Concannon as a high-profile defector, a canny and successful arts manager whose ambitions were not met by resources. For his part, Concannon says that, after the arts, business is "the only other honest thing in the world . . . because its only objective is to make money". This argument may seem a little spurious, unless the actions of, say, Enron and WorldCom have simply been woefully misunderstood gestures of altruism. But Concannon's intentions are undoubtedly pure.

When the carbon footprint of Delphi has shrunk, and the investors have seen their dividends, could he be tempted back into the arts, facilitating "the pure and utter magic of creation" as he puts it? "I don't know, is the answer," he says. "I don't know."

And then comes the bright pivot of the eternal entrepreneur: "But if a challenge came up . . ."