The Arts: From the early years of disengagement and censorship, the State has come to recognise the value to society of supporting both individual artists and public access to the arts.

"Let it be no more said that the states encourage arts; for it is the arts that encourage states"- William Blake

It could be argued that the modern Irish State evolved from an artistic rather than a political intervention, because the role that culture played in imagining the nation was vital to its realisation. Without the Abbey Theatre, without the poems of Padraig Pearse, without the revitalisation of Irish oral traditions, without the congregation of dancers at the crossroads, modern Ireland might never have been born at all.

Despite the primary place of culture at the core of Ireland's self-image, the relationship between the arts and the State in post-independence Ireland was considerably fraught. In its early years, governments made grand gestures to the arts, namely the establishment of a Garda military band, the foundation of an Irish-language theatre and the provision of committed financial assistance to the Abbey Theatre, making it the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world.

However, government policy on the arts in those years was virtually non-existent. The prevalent attitude was that the arts were a luxury the emerging State could not afford, an attitude reinforced by a post-colonial conservativism that saw the "fine arts" or "high arts" as inimical to native Irish culture. In fact, the only official government policy on the arts in these years was the strict censorship laws, which effectively silenced many Irish artists for decades and drove others away.

However, in the post-second World War period, the interventionist ideas behind the emergence of the welfare state forced the arts and government back into dialogue. Just as health, education and social welfare services were to be open to all as a right, so the arts gradually came to be seen as an essential public service too. Initially, however, political gestures came in the shape of "aid to artists" rather than "aids to access", as the first fraught decades of the Arts Council, which was established in 1951, confirmed.

Although the Arts Council's founding focus was a commitment to the support of "painting, sculpture, architecture, music, drama, literature, design in industry, the fine arts and the applied arts generally", the body gradually became increasingly committed to an elitist, artist-driven agenda. In 1957, it deliberately excluded traditional and amateur arts from its remit, arguing that creativity expressed at the céilí or the crossroads had a different value from professional art. In these early years the goal was less to lobby for improved government policy on the arts than to gain grant aid for individual artists.

Under the directorship of Colm Ó Bríain in the 1970s, the Arts Council gradually began to work towards the axis of public access. The establishment of a ministry position for the arts, the tax-exemption scheme for artists, a service awards scheme in the shape of Aósdana, and the encouragement of local government initiatives, gradually contributed to an extension of the relationship between the arts and the public. However, as Mervyn Wall, secretary of the Arts Council during this formative period, pointed out (with an anxiety that still pervades much of the debate about government funding for the arts): "The State must of course legislate for culture . . . the State must not call the tune."

SINCE THE 1980S, grassroots or participatory practice has been re-integrated into public arts policy, typically represented by the Arts Council's realignment with amateur and traditional arts. As a recent Arts Council report on the participatory arts stated: "The amateur arts have a value in themselves for practitioners, provide access to the arts for others, and can be a first introduction to the arts for yet others who go on to specialise professionally."

It is the status of participatory arts in government policy that is truly at the heart of the dialogue between the public and the arts. It is through the participatory arts that members of the public are most inclined to find the encouragement to seek out other forms of artistic experience, where they are most likely to find their lives changed - on a fundamental, practical level - by art.

The Arts Council's interest in participatory arts extends across all levels of the organisation: on a structural level, with consultant positions for Arts and Health, Arts and Disability, and Arts Participation; and on an outreach level, through the work of many of the arts organisations being funded by the council. The interdisciplinary nature of participation attracts funding from other government bodies too, especially where community affairs and social inclusion are concerned.

However, for many of those involved in providing community arts services, the lack of centralised policy is frustrating because it means fundraising is both piecemeal and uncertain: a grant here, a private donation there. The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Séamus Brennan, insists that "joined-up-thinking" is an important priority for his term in office.

"Linkage with other departments [on arts initiatives] beyond the Per Cent for Art scheme is not sufficiently strong," he says. "We need to do some work on it."

However, the question that dogs the participatory arts continues to be asked: is a collaborative tapestry, a community concert, a hand-made float for a parade, really art? Practitioners, facilitators and art therapists emphatically argue for an appreciation of work produced in a community context as "process art": that is, as a form of artistic expression where it is not the end product but the creative experiences that individuals encounter that is important.

For theatre practitioner Martin Drury, the opportunity for a non-artistic community to experience the arts through participation is particularly important today when "the availability of culture as a passive experience is enormous. The market forces that are at play to turn us into mere consumers are so extraordinary that the right of the citizen to be a maker, or a player, or a participant, is eroded year by year." Amateur arts and participatory arts challenge the public to move beyond mere consumption, to become involved at a grassroots level where positive attitudes towards the arts can be fostered through direct experience.

However, it is at local rather than national level that these experiences play out, and the growth in local authority funding for the arts, and the way in which that funding is being used, is a testament to the growing importance of the arts in a broader public context.

Arts Council director Mary Cloake says that the council works closely with local authority art departments in developing strategies, policy and implementation, referring to the council's landmark decision to extend its work through local departments in the 1970s, at a time when centralisation was government policy. Every single county in Ireland now boasts its own arts officer, supported in many cases by a qualified arts team, while the larger catchment areas, such as Dublin, Cork and Galway, have several teams.

CLOAKE FEELS THATthe work of local government departments has been crucial in building urban and rural communities. "The arts have been crucial for forging local identities," she says.

More importantly, Cloake insists that, through local government involvement, the arts have "become embedded in community and enterprise settings. aren't seen as an extra satellite, but as part of a wider sense of the social agenda. Suddenly the arts are not strange or exotic or discretionary. They are being embedded into parts of community's lives. That's a really good piece of public service action."

Prof Anthony Everitt's report, The Creative Imperative: A Report on Support for Individual Artists in Ireland(2000), states that "if universal access to the arts and culture is a fundamental objective of public policy, this applies to creators as much as consumers". The increased emphasis on access in government policy can be a source of anxiety for artists. There is a fear that policy-makers will lose sight of the difference between the essential nature of the arts and their useful additional functions, that access programmes and the participatory arts will supersede the most important quality of art: its existence as something undefinable, unquantifiable, beyond reductive reasoning.

Willie White, the artistic director of Dublin's Project Arts Centre, is measured about this fear.

"The idea of art for art's sake is an old- fashioned one anyway," he says. "Art is a necessary part of the civic infrastructure. But art is not an instrument of social policy, and a big worry for people in the arts is that money will be siphoned off for [community work] when they're already struggling. Ultimately, we need more art, not more policy."

As Mary Cloake insists, however, art for art's sake will continue to have a fundamental role outside of access issues, reflected in the continued increased funding for artists both individually and at institutional level. It is at the level of art for art's sake, she says - with its commitment to "risk and formal and technical experiment" - that art finds its most profound public use.

"Art is about shaping and changing people's ideas of the world."