State putting money where mouth is with culture plan

Enda Kenny was 45 minutes late for his appointment in the National Gallery. "Not the first time Fine Gael has been late when it comes to culture," grumbled one of the hundreds of arts heavyweights standing in the splendidly refurbished Shaw Room, with its newly revealed windows and freshly painted walls awaiting the return of the gallery's collection after five years in exile.

You couldn’t swing an iPhone in the crowded hall without hitting a director of a cultural institution yesterday. These people tend to have a good nose for waffle, but there was no doubt that the Taoiseach impressed them with a speech that included a strong affirmation of the importance of culture in creating a successful, vibrant, cohesive society in the face of a world where those values seem increasingly under threat. He also seemed to persuade them that, although they wouldn’t see much of it in 2017, his Government was now prepared to put its money where its mouth was when it came to supporting and encouraging Irish creativity.

There's a widely held view across the cultural sector that, when it comes to the arts and creativity, Fine Gael has the worst record of all our parties of government. Fianna Fáil's brand of patronage delivered concrete benefits in the form of tax breaks and big infrastructure projects. Labour could point to Michael D Higgins's groundbreaking five years as the State's first arts minister. Fine Gael, though, rarely moved beyond platitudes and pieties, and wasn't averse to a few swingeing cuts either.

Good faith

So there was a ripple of approbation across the audience when Heather Humphreys announced a new pilot scheme providing income support to low-earning artists through the social welfare system. This is a modest proposal which has been knocking around for a while, and it's unlikely to cost the State much money. But the fact that it had actually been listened to and that action would now be taken seemed to function as a guarantee of good faith, that the grandiose talk would be followed by some real action.

Which is important, because most of what is scheduled – for the next 12 months at least – is intangible. (As Labour's Joan Burton pointed out, the total financial commitment to the sector for 2017 is well below the amounts spent in 2016.) Instead we have plans. Plans for capital investment. Plans for boosting the film and TV industry. Plans for art in education. Plans for local arts activity.

Plans and reality

All these plans will at some point require some cold hard cash to turn them into reality. So it was no coincidence that we were hearing all this in these surroundings; the gallery will finally reopen next year after the biggest State capital expenditure on a cultural resource since the financial bust. Nor was it an accident that the Minister for Public Expenditure was on the stage. As Catherine Heaney, the chair of the National Museum of Ireland pointed out, placing support for capital investment in the national cultural institutions into the capital development programme "is an important departure in contemporary Government policy".

By any objective measure, this is the most ambitious plan for culture in a quarter of a century. Will it really happen? The proof will come relatively quickly, in that capital development programme and in Budget 2018. An interesting 10 months lie ahead.