A measure of how prestigious the arts in Ireland have become is the news that Sile De Valera and her Department seriously pose the question of whether they should now take them as their own. Ten years ago no respectable civil servant or politician would have wanted to. People rolling round naked in blue paint or making music a dog would whine to? Not in my ward. The Minister's discussion document on the Arts Council asks whether she who pays the piper ought to call the tune. The questions in response are why, and why now? The first yields an easy answer. The 17-person Arts Council she appointed just over two years ago pioneered more splits than a Russian gymnast. More to the point, the arts are perceived as good for business and good for image.
Walking in the dark shadow of Charles J. Haughey, junior ministers from Tom Kitt to Seamus Brennan realise how arts patronage yields maximum returns on minimal investments. When Haughey introduced his internationally headline-grabbing scheme to exempt creative artists from tax, fewer than 10 of the State's wealthiest visual artists were earning enough to enter the tax net in the first place. Smart stuff. Bertie Ahern's familial association with Westlife, never mind his photo opportunities with Andrea Corr, shows that when it comes to pumping the hand of popular culture, this ring of "the arts" spins as perfectly as an Aristotelian vision of the cosmos. Politicians want it, they even claim to like it, so ought they to control it directly, without being bumped off centre by an independent agency?
It's a Thatcherite proposal that calls for a Thatcher-bite response - "no, no, no". Dazed by the glow of such shiny, happy people, central government is on the brink of ignoring its own nature. Ask the voters of Dublin North Central or Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown to which of the following they would give their first preference: Ronan Keating, Anne Enright or James Coleman? Coleman, by the way, is the man from Clare.
Really great art-making is about taking risks. Really enduring politics may take some, but minimises most. Even everyday art-making needs its edge; day-today politics is obliged to blur it. Virtually all arts policy decisions taken directly by governments since the founding of the State favoured the safe over the scary. This is "muse-ak", pap, too dim to qualify as pulp fiction.
This is the country whose politicians refused various gifts or cheap acquisitions by artists from Picasso and Rouault to Sean Scully, which banned Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks by virtue of its title alone (actually from St Paul, as in "blessed is he who kicks against the pricks", one of Paul's more insightful moments). Even allowing the possibility that politicians and central government may put hands on hearts, promising they will do better, it is not the case that Sile De Valera, or, longer term, her Department, have given reasons for us to believe they have the vision, professionalism or bureaucratic freedom to make arts or culture policy on their own.
The Minister inherited direct control of a range of cultural institutions whose health is, by European standards, hardly inspiring. The National Library, gallery, archive and museum are all under-resourced and understaffed. Rooms remain closed, papers remain uncatalogued, acquisitions of collections or individual works cannot be made because the institutions are working from budgets that make market sense only if we close our eyes and pretend it is 1950. Staff cannot be paid properly by comparison with international peers, so only the most committed continue to serve, alongside the least talented who might not make the grade in comparable institutions elsewhere. Education and outreach programmes challenge the definition of the term modest. There are no places which mediate science and technology, as does, for example, London's Science Museum, no places where the State's rich ecological resources can be excitingly explored, nor its architecture . . . and that covers only Dublin.
SILE de Valera and her officials can congratulate themselves on starting to put right some outstanding matters - arts funding, capital initiatives. However, their position on matters from copyright and artists' resale rights to the film industry, both commercial and otherwise, don't fill you with optimism.
With regret, because she is an excellent Arts Minister on the points that matter - funding, making a case at Cabinet - we must note how Sile De Valera's understanding of the nuanced issues in arts debate was badly exposed by the resignations of key Arts Council members who found their position unworkable. At best, her combination of interests was naive. The advice provided to her was either ill-judged or unusually cynical. The arts developed their profile as a sector over the last 10 years by a series of smart strategies which had to blur some edges in order to achieve the right outcome. The Arts Council's job was to create the conditions in which the arts could flourish, and they are. But let's not fool ourselves. Along with opening nights in France, Germany, and most recently Washington, went a core mission that was and may always be considerably less attractive. Along with the soundbite emphasis on "access" and an insistence on sharing the good news went an acceptance that, at bottom, much arts funding must expect, perhaps welcome, the subsidy of failure.
Talk about failure is not good news. But it happens. A big chunk of arts practice is about getting there, rather than arriving. Fail, fail again, fail better. So Beckett wrote, with years of experience. Let the Minister and her department put their own house in order before they take it on themselves to control arts policy and management. Politicians aren't patrons, they are trustees. The smart ones should run a thousand miles from her immodest proposal.