EARLIER THIS year Minister Seamus Brennan, set out his priorities for the arts through what he called his "Arts and Culture Plan 2008". There already exists the Arts Council's Partnership for the Arts 2006-2010 document, the result of extensive consultation across the sector.
It might well have seemed as if the council plan was being sidelined before its full implementation. Theatre Forum, which represents a wide cross-section of the performing arts, has now come back with reaction that voices concerns that the Minister would do well to heed.
Theatre Forum extends a "cautious welcome" for Mr Brennan's general aims: greater inclusion, the championing of excellence, and his advocacy for developing and expanding opportunities for touring beyond Dublin. It warns that Mr Brennan's wish to see extended opening hours in the National Cultural Institutions, while desirable, will have cost implications that cannot be drained from existing resources.
What it does not applaud is the Minister's reluctance to provide any assurance on meeting the commitment to bring Arts Council funding to the "Partnership" target of €100 million. Theatre Forum is right to be most blunt on the matter: "The Council is the primary source of funding and development of the arts in Ireland and therefore responsible for the greatest source of indirect employment in the arts", and to note that while the National Cultural Institutions all received significant increases for 2008, the Arts Council did not.
While an impressive overall investment of €250 million in the arts is proclaimed in his plan, the Arts Council is still unable to make provision for much needed multi-annual funding that would allow it, as Theatre Forum says, to "respond in a more meaningful way to the plans and ambitions of arts organisations the length and breadth of the country".
What is more germane to wider social inclusion in the arts is the linkage of the arts and education: so why has the report of an inter-departmental committe on this matter - and its recommendations - been kept under wraps for so long by the Departments of Education and Arts? But perhaps of most significance is the call to the Minister to reaffirm the arm's length principle in the relationship between government and Arts Council. The Minister's stated intention to issue directions to the council on arts-related matters would set a dangerous precedent and a serious breach of the arm's length principle that would warrant a much more robust and widespread protest from the arts sector as a whole.