Looking for a new Northern light

Robert Agnew will retire in March from the post of Executive Director of the Belfast Festival at Queen's. He joined the festival as Publicity Manager (with responsibility also for the Grand Opera House)in 1980; he became Assistant Director in 1984 and Executive Director in 1994. He told festival staff at the end of last year's event that he intended to retire this year.

The job of Festival Director will now be advertised, which will combine Agnew's job with that of the programming director. This has to be an advantage, because the job of programming director was a temporary one, and there were periods when there was none at all. At these times, Agnew and his team stepped into the breach. Perhaps the post of Director will give the programming of the festival more stability.

Assistant Executive Director Rosie Turner reckons a new incumbent will not be in place before May, however, which means he or she will, as Turner says, "have to hit the ground running", as November's festival programme is far from set. Considering that major acts can be booked years in advance, it's a very bad way to start the job, and one can only wonder why the Queen's board, which runs the festival, couldn't have appointed a Director Designate last year.

Potential candidates for the job? Some wild guesses: Ali Curran, now running the Dublin Fringe Festival, sometimes expresses a desire to return to her native city; Chris Bailey, Arts Officer with Belfast City Council; Una McCarthy, who has been director of the Old Museum Arts Centre; or Pauline Ross, of the Playhouse in Derry.

It may not be as easy as all that to attract the cream of the crop to the job, however. Arts recruitment seems to be getting harder and harder - the long hours and the relatively low pay are a turn-off in today's booming Ireland. The Arts Council has cancelled the interviews for the job of Drama Officer (with a payscale from £22,000 to £28,000) because there were only a handful of applicants.

The bad press which the Council's management got towards the end of last year probably didn't whet people's appetite to join up, though the Council's Head of Public Affairs, Nessa O'Mahoney, points out that there were enough applicants for the other jobs which the Council has recently advertised. She suggests that people might have presumed that Jane Daly, who had been doing the job on a short-term contract, would automatically get the job, but Daly always intended to leave after six months. Now the Council may call in a recruitment agency help find in a Drama Officer.

The Queen's Festival can't be caught napping this year, as another general arts festival will kick off this year in the city. The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival will take place in the environs of St. Ann's Cathedral from May 1st to May 7th. Director Sean Kelly, who has responsible for the programming of Derry's Verbal Arts Centre, says: "I'm keeping my cards close to my chest" at the moment. The festival will be officially launched at the end of March.

The event is being run through the Community Arts Forum and the backers are Belfast City Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, while the Laganside Corporation provided the "seeding money". What differentiates this festival from the Queen's event and the West Belfast Festival is that it will be held in an area which is "neutral", or as Kelly says, "fairly accessible from all parts of town and not owned by any section of the community".

It will also benefit from longer nights, and perhaps even good weather, so that more outdoor events can be organised. It will, says Kelly, be "a mainstream festival with a strong community input" and will reflect the level of arts activity going on in the Cathedral Quarter. The Catalyst, Proposition and Clearspot galleries are all in the area, as is the College of Arts, Northern Visions video and media resource studio, and the Community Arts Forum itself. There are many pubs which host music, the pipe-making workshop of Sam Murray, Belfast Community Circus School, a bespoke boot-maker's and any amount of interesting activity.

Germaine Greer, Bernard Mac Laverty and Ronan Bennett are set to feature on the literature programme, and there will be a poet-in-residence, Brendan Cleary. Companies who featured in the Dublin or Edinburgh Fringe such as Bedrock and Ridiculusmus are on the wish-list, are well as Paul Motion's New York jazz quartet. Performance artists John Cooper Clarke and Atilla the Stockbroker will hopefully visit. There will be a debate, held in conjunction with Fortnight magazine, on the subject "Belfast - city of culture?" with representatives from the different political parties.

How many retirement parties can a person have? Tony O Dalaigh is barely a wet week out of his job as Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, and the news has come in that he is Artistic Director of the Draiocht Arts Centre in Blanchardstown, which will open in October.

O Dalaigh himself stresses that it is a part-time job. A full-time administrative post will also be created and O Dalaigh hopes to pass the baton on to a younger person in due course. He is bubbling with enthusiasm about the centre, which is rising from the ground as you read this, linked at first floor level to the biggest local authority library in the country.

Flexibility will be the new centre's huge asset. The theatre, with a retractable proscenium arch, will have 240 seats and what O Dalaigh calls: "a massive stage and fly tower, with lashings of depth and width, the delight of dance companies." It wouldn't be a wild guess that the Dublin Theatre Festival will have a show there this year. There will also be "lots of" exhibition space. Upstairs, the rehearsal space will be the size of the stage, and an easily made division will create a second rehearsal or performance space.

The whole cost of the centre will be about £4 million, and despite Arts Council and Fingal Co. Council support, the last million is still being wrestled to the ground by the dynamic board, headed by businessman, Alan Connolly, and including past Dublin 15 resident, Moya Doherty.

Beowulf, another Irish masterpiece? Not quite, but asked by the Sunday Herald at Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival wasn't it strange that an Irish poet should choose to translate from Anglo-Saxon, Whitbread winner Seamus Heaney replied, jocularly: "It could be a poem from Northumbria, which had the Scotti, as the Irish were then called, right adjacent to it. And all those Celtic Christians from Iona were filing into Northumbria, meeting the Angles on the way up. What we think of as a defined England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales was much more in flux at in the second half of the first Millennium."

`There's nothing cute about little John Nee." Not in the American sense, maybe, but he and director Paraic Breathnach have been cute enough to get onto the front page of the Washington Post, so good is the review of their Derry Boat, playing in Virginia.

The Waterfront Hall and Moving On Music are running an international roots music series on Sunday evenings from February 6th in the studio space - acts include the flamenco troupe, Rafael, the Irish traditional band, Danu, the Mercury Award winning jazz group, the Denys Baptiste Quartet and the Punjabi Jugnu Bhangra Group: to book phone 08 01232 334455 . . . a series of readings and lectures takes place at Butler House, Kilkenny, from tonight for six weeks at 8 p.m. - tonight Michael Longley will read, next week Professor Hugh Kearney will lecture on "Creating an Irish nation: Ireland as a multiethnic society, while Mary Smith from the island of Lewis will sing and lecture on Scottish and Irish Gaelic song on February 10th: for information phone 056 65103/51847.