WITH AN attendance of over 80,000 people at events around Dublin city, last year's Culture Night can be deemed a big success. Certainly, this now well-established annual opening up of our cultural institutions to those who might not normally venture into such spaces, has captured the public imagination and made its mark on the cultural calendar.
The decision to move beyond the capital this year and include several other cities - Cork, Galway and Limerick will also host events tonight - will further consolidate the role of Culture Night in bringing the arts and our cultural heritage to a new and broader audience.
The experience is free and the programme of events has been imaginatively devised by our museums, galleries, theatres, and other venues to draw in both the seasoned "consumer" and the merely curious. Those running our cultural institutions have quickly learned the value of this sampling opportunity.
This year's Culture Night comes at a time of some anxiety in those institutions, as well as throughout the arts sector in general, about the impact of the economic downturn on arts expenditure and whether the very positive and enlightened Government approach of recent years is about to give way to a return to a period of stagnation. The increase from €44.1 million in 2003 to €85 million this year has been an investment that was long owing to the creative enterprises in which we so much like to express our pride.
The funding issue, and particularly the Arts Council's responsibilities in the matter, has provoked some lively debate in this newspaper in recent weeks. As Theo Dorgan pointed out in his contribution, the council is a "powerful advocate in this process only up to a point". The lifeline of adequate funding can be read as a measure of the political regard, or disregard, for the arts.
Culture Night, as well as being a celebration and an occasion for greater communal enjoyment of and engagement with the arts, might also act as a reminder of their unique contribution to the wellbeing of the community - one that cannot be measured on any balance sheet. The very noble words of Minister of State Martin Mansergh, speaking in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annamakerrig last week, when he said that it is to work of the imagination that we will always turn "for solace, renewal and hope", deserve to be taken into account when discussion on future funding comes up in the weeks ahead.