ARTSCAPE:THERE WAS A sort of alignment this week: the assertion of the importance of culture at Farmleigh, a double Emmy win, Culture Night making an impact across the country, the start of Dublin Theatre Festival, and the coming together, possibly for the first time, of people from a cross-section of artistic achievement in Ireland to attempt to act strategically.
Artists are hardly turning into the IFA or Ibec, but there is a clear move towards action. At the starry launch of the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA), Abbey director Fiach Mac Conghail said that although many artists, by their nature, work privately and alone, visual artists, theatre people, musicians, film-makers, writers and architects were coming together by signing up to the campaign (ncfa.ie and nationalcampaignfor thearts.wordpress.com) and at constituency level via Facebook. And about 40 Dublin councillors and TDs responded to an invite to the theatre festival opening, where Roddy Doyle spoke eloquently.
There has been some sniping at the edges, including a piece by Stuart McLaughlin of Business to Arts in these pages recently, and there are certainly competing agendas at work, with a big scissors looming over the Arts Council, a huge axe hanging over Culture Ireland and the Irish Film Board, and, most especially, a question mark over the continued existence of the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism. The revelations about the outrageous expenses of a previous minister at the department (an issue imperiously handled, and still unresolved in terms of how such spending is authorised and whether this is par for the course for other departments) are surely no help. The expenses issue must be particularly galling for many of the individuals and companies supported by the department, directly or indirectly, who operate on lean shoestrings.
So, positive moves are welcome. The new campaign already encompasses 20,000 members, and much has been made of a figure of around 170,000 people working in the cultural sector. Even without taking into account the many people who consume culture – books, films, plays, music – there is political potential there, and the potential to elect a candidate.
Mac Conghail, quoting Sebastian Barry (the McCarthy report is “the blueprint for the dismembering of the nation”), acknowledged that there must be cuts, but “artists want to be positive about turning things round and contributing to recovery. What the McCarthy report is missing is the vision for how to get out of this, the vision that Whitaker and Lemass had.”
Colm Tóibín said that while Bord Snip Nua consisted of economists talking about an economy, "luckily we have politicians who wish to create a society". We've been lucky with our arts ministers, and with ministers for foreign affairs, he added. "They hear about it all the time, they go abroad with our culture ahead of them . . . And the economy hanging off them like a ball and chain."
He was scathing about the taxation report, which suggested abolishing the tax exemption for artists and implied that sportspeople would be better role models. “When I was growing up as a teenager in the late 1960s , role models for me were people like John McGahern, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, John Broderick – and they were all in England.” Today young people have an army of cultural role models based in Ireland.
The report said that art would be produced without support, but Tóibín said such a view didn’t take into account how an artist makes art throughout a lifetime, and how, say, artists in their 50s, who have depended on the exemption in order to manage a life, might find things falling apart if it were to be withdrawn.
“It may be a romantic ideal. Do they think ruined people can go on producing work?” he asked. “Look at Flann O’Brien or Paddy Kavanagh and what happened to them.” It’s a “fragile ecosystem”.
The cupboard is a bit bare, Gerry Godley said, but looking around at all the high-achievers at the launch, “the mantelpiece is groaning” with awards, trophies, Man Bookers, Oscars, Emmys and Fringe Firsts.
