OPINION:THE BOOM and bust of the Irish property market, the Irish banks and the Irish economy as a whole are going to be featured in textbooks around the world in decades to come. And if things turn out well when everything has settled down and people no longer worry about bailout troikas, bond rates and currency break-ups, there's even a small chance that the textbooks will dwell on the success of the turnaround as well.
There’s hardly an aspect of life in Ireland that hasn’t been affected. And although cultural tourism has been proclaimed a political priority, and we are justifiably proud of the country’s many internationally successful cultural icons, it’s undeniable that public funding of the arts has suffered drastically over the last five years.
Ireland’s public funding of the arts is anything but generous by international standards. The Government’s grant-in-aid to the Arts Council peaked in 2006 at €83 million. Last year it was €68.6 million, and this year just €65.2 million. The cultural budget of the city of Vienna (with a population of under two million) was €218.6 million in 2010, and that budget doesn’t include support for institutions like the Vienna State Opera, which are supported through national funds.
If you’ve kept abreast of the situation of opera in Ireland over the last few years, you will have witnessed one of the most grotesque, unbelievable, and bizarre though not unprecedented cock-ups that’s ever befallen an art form in Ireland.
In brief, the Arts Council decided to force its three major opera clients – Opera Ireland, Opera Theatre Company and Wexford Festival Opera – out of existence, and create a new start-up entity that would be based in Wexford, and which would embrace the roles of all three. It was the kind of venture that chimed with Charlie McCreevy’s decentralisation plans, and the council tried to proceed with it in the face of resistance by the three companies affected.
The council did not have ministerial blessing for this development, and then minister Martin Cullen embarked instead on a rather more sensible plan to create a Dublin-based Irish National Opera company (marrying the functions of Opera Ireland and Opera Theatre Company). The idea left Wexford (which sustains its well-deserved international reputation through a repertoire that’s the equivalent of minor Thackeray, as well as obscure excavations from the likes of Thomas Love Peacock) as a stand-alone entity.
Cullen was slow in creating the new enterprise and, when Mary Hanafin succeeded him, she just kicked the can down the road. Last May – after the new company had actually recruited a general director, and with Opera Ireland already dead – Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan killed off the project.
The history of the Arts Council’s support of opera is a litany of errors, with report after report after report being written, and little in the way of implementation to show for them.
Over the last five years, the Arts Council support of opera has dropped from €4.6 million to €2.2 million. The council’s grant-in-aid fell by 21 per cent over the period, but the council cut its support of opera by 52 per cent. To put that in context, in 2006 the council had agreed to its own opera working group’s recommended spend of €5.7 million.
However, the situation now may be a lot worse than even those figures suggest. The council seems reluctant to learn from past mistakes.
Its response to Deenihan’s burying of Irish National Opera was to hold yet another consultation process. That in itself is bad enough. None of its other consultation processes on opera has actually had a productive outcome.
The council is clearly happy to have another go at overturning Roy Keane’s contention that stupidity is doing the same things and expecting different results.
On the other hand, the council may well be up to something different altogether. It has circulated two documents to those individuals and organisations it is consulting.
One of them, Future Provision of Opera is available on its website (at url.ie/d8b6). The other, an opinion piece by British critic Robert Thicknesse, is not, perhaps because it includes sentiments like “the council needs to be part of the solution rather than the problem”.
The Provision document ponders questions and issues that all seem perfectly reasonable until you realise they wouldn’t ever be asked about Arts Council support of theatre, literature or visual art.
“In light of diminishing public funding for the arts, should indigenous production of main-scale opera remain a priority?” As if the council would ever radically undermine the kind of work that is presented by the Abbey, Gate or Druid.
It wonders if the work of visiting companies at the Grand Canal Theatre and the emergence of a new company in Northern Ireland, NI Opera, should “be taken into account in considering how public funding can most effectively be used”. As if the work of visiting theatre companies would ever be used, as the council seems to be suggesting, to retire efforts to support effective Irish theatre in Ireland.
It wants to “consider to what extent subsidy for opera production should be conditional upon providing opportunities for Irish opera practitioners, such as singers, conductors, directors and designers”. As if its theatre, literary or visual arts budgets would ever be mainly spent on the endeavours of non-Irish artists.
The council’s sorry achievement is to have left opera in Ireland in a state that allows such questions to seem plausible. Only the Wexford Festival now produces what is awkwardly called “main-scale” opera, and its use of Irish singers, directors, designers, conductors and repetiteurs has long been minimal.
It’s bad enough that Irish singers who perform on the leading stages of Europe and the US are not heard at home. But the fundamental failure is even greater. The word “composer” doesn’t even make a single appearance in the council’s document. As if you could even hope to have vibrant theatre without playwrights, art without artists, or poetry without poets.
Don’t hold your breath on the council proving Roy Keane wrong. There’s not much doubt about which part of any future textbook the Arts Council’s handling of opera is likely to feature in. That’s a projection about which I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.