Jerome Hynes, who collapsed and died as he was making an announcement from the stage of the Theatre Royal in Wexford on Sunday night, could have been a very rich man. When I first met him 25 years ago, he was managing what was then a very small theatre company, Druid in Galway. But even then, in his early twenties, he might have been running a large multinational corporation. In the shambolic, often chaotic world of the arts in Ireland, where more energy was expended on complaining about what could not be done than on achieving what could, he oozed confidence, competence and charm, writes Fintan O'Toole
He was an entrepreneur who would have made a fortune in any business he chose to enter.
What makes his loss significant beyond the personal devastation of his family and friends, and the irreparable impoverishment of the Irish arts world, is that he wasn't terribly interested in making a fortune. Instead, he put the skills that could have made him rich to work for the gaiety of the nation, embodying in the process the idea that business can and should be about much more than greed.
Jerome Hynes loved art. The last time I met him was at a Footsbarn show in Dublin, which he had skipped dinner to attend, and on which he fed with a gourmet's enthusiasm. But he had no pretensions to being an artist. Indeed, that Footsbarn show was a perfect setting for him - the tent of a wild gang of travelling players pitched in the middle of the Irish Financial Services Centre, the clean, slick space of corporate money-making occupied by the rough-edged roguery of art.
Jerome was a businessman and a bloody good one. He told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Arts, Sport and Tourism, when he appeared before it in October 2003 as deputy chair of the Arts Council, that "I regard myself as a business person who happens to work in the arts. We have got to run the arts as a business." He was as comfortable in Wexford Chamber of Commerce, of which he was a long-time director, as he was at the Wexford Opera Festival, of which he had been chief executive since 1988.
The effect of his ideal of what a business person could achieve in the arts was obvious. He took two different arts companies in places with little cultural infrastructure - Druid in Galway and the Wexford Festival Opera - and gave them the platform on which to achieve and sustain a world-class status. By the time he left Druid in 1988 it had been transformed from a brilliant but fragile initiative into a major international theatre company. In Wexford, he consolidated and expanded the opera festival to a point where practically every ticket for every event was a guaranteed sell-out. When he died, he was just about to transform the Theatre Royal by expanding its original auditorium and adding a second, smaller space. That he had put in place €25 million of public and private funding was a mark of the confidence and trust that he inspired.
But there was much more to him than his ability to handle money, run the show and make hard-nosed decisions. His broader significance lay not in his capacity to bring business skills to the arts world, but in his ability to bring artistic values to the business world.
In a society that has become fixated on the worship of business for its own sake, Jerome saw business as a means to an end. It was what you needed in order to get things done, but those things were not themselves measurable by bank accounts: creativity, regeneration, pleasure, the enrichment of social, intellectual and spiritual life.
At the same time as he told the Oireachtas that he was businessman in the arts, he also reminded them that there was far more to art - and by implication life - than financial accounting: "It was a catch cry that one was better arriving at the Arts Council with a bank manager on one's shoulder than with a good artistic idea. That has changed and will continue to change. Artistic success should be rewarded, not only for established organisations but those that are growing - individuals, small galleries and theatre companies who are at that early stage when it is too early to see their potential. It is the council's job to get in there and to give them the self-confidence and the courage to move forward."
Mere accountancy, he warned, would stifle creativity and limit the ability to take risks.
In his own appallingly short life, he spread those virtues of self-confidence, courage and creativity around him. He defied the mediocrity and begrudgery of an old Ireland, without embracing the brash arrogance and narrow-minded pursuit of money of the new one. He contributed immensely to the regeneration of both Galway and Wexford. He created the conditions in which many people could realise their artistic visions and many others could be moved to tears and laughter and revel in the adventure of risk and achievement. If the lesson he taught about the way business can be made to work for larger goals is not forgotten, the void left by his departure will be a little diminished.