Getting rid of Culture Ireland could turn a vibrant artistic vision into the land of the bland

CULTURE SHOCK:I LOVE BEING IRISH. What I hate is the yearly display of crying, arguing and public drunkenness that goes with it." This is Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson on St Patrick's Day in Boardwalk Empire.

‘To bear him out, the show has a perfectly hideous St Patrick’s Eve Celtic dinner. It has the whole shebang: the shamrocks, the kilted pipers, the Irish flags, the oceans of whiskey, a precisely crafted pastiche of the maudlin Irish speech, delivered by Nucky’s dumb brother, Eli, complete with tributes to the men of 1916, including “Éamonn Cent”. Behind the scenes, Nucky has to haggle with the dwarfs who are threatening to go on strike because they’re fed up with being dressed as leprechauns and abused by drunken oafs.

The horror of the episode is a reminder of the double-edged nature of the promotion of Irish culture, especially on the day that’s in it. Ireland doesn’t just have a culture to promote: it also has a culture to demote.

The attention that St Patrick’s Day brings is an asset for a small country. But it also generates a tide of cliche, sentimentality and slobbery foolishness that threatens to drown everything in waves of green beer. Projecting Irish culture abroad is a very tricky business. The problem isn’t getting attention, it’s getting a different kind of attention.

Which is why the one thing the Government could most usefully do today would be to resolve to leave Culture Ireland alone. There are so many ways to mess up the idea of using culture as Ireland’s calling card that it is almost miraculous that, in the seven years it has been around, Culture Ireland has managed to avoid them all. It is an arm of the State that actually works. No surprises, then, that an arm of the State that patently does not work, the Department of Finance (through its offspring the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform), is trying to abolish it.

Readers will know by now that the Government’s proposal, reiterated in the budget, is to absorb Culture Ireland into the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. No justification has been put forward other than the general notion of abolishing quangos. As it happens, Culture Ireland is widely respected (not least in the US) as a lean, efficient and effective organisation that delivers far more than its €4 million annual budget would suggest. But the point is not just that the proposal is ignorant and philistine. It is also, more importantly, that it completely misunderstands the business of cultural promotion.

An official agency for promoting Irish culture is a living paradox. It has to deal with the contradiction between the two words that define it. “Promotion” is a nicer synonym for “propaganda”. It is innately biased towards the upbeat and the optimistic. But “culture” – particularly as it is expressed in vibrant contemporary art – is critical, challenging, subversive. It may even be embarrassing – much of Irish theatre, for example, shows the Irish as a feckless, drunken, violent, abusive bunch, redeemed only by their love of colourful language.

In this sense, individual works of art seldom promote the country in any literal way. The effect they may have is broad and indirect. Is a Marina Carr play with dark convolutions of incest, madness and violence likely to make the chief executive of an American corporation think, Hey, that Ireland looks a great place to invest in! Do films as bleak as Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam and Paul and Garage present the required image of a dynamic, high-tech, well-educated, globalised workforce? Of course not. What happens instead is that a cumulative exposure to a range of works and performances gets across the idea of Ireland as a place that’s interesting, distinctive and imaginative. That in turn may seep out into a larger and deeper awareness of the country as something more than an egregious economic screw-up.

This is a complex business, and it has to be very carefully mediated. The complexity lies in that basic contradiction: we’re looking for an official way to conduct an enterprise that has to be relentlessly unofficial.

Artists are not the State or the IDA or the diplomatic service. They’re not in this world to be bland and emollient, to provide comfort and reassurance, to burnish a tarnished reputation or sell a shiny image. They exist to make things strange and knotty and insecure. Their work may, collectively, enhance the country’s stature, but for each of them individually this effect must be accidental and irrelevant. Otherwise, the work will be boring and therefore useless to everyone. It will do nothing for Ireland’s standing in the world because everyone will simply ignore it.

The key to coping with this contradiction is the existence of an agency that has a foot in both worlds, that belongs to both the State and the artistic community. And this demands one thing above all: independence. Or rather two kinds of independence: an arm’s-length relationship with the State and a profound respect for the independence of the artistic voice.

Culture Ireland, greatly to the credit of John O’Donoghue, who established it, and of Fiach Mac Conghail, who advised him, has this idea at its core. Mission statements have to be treated sceptically, but it is worth recalling that the first core value identified in Culture Ireland’s is “independence”. It is required to “respect and protect the integrity of the artistic process, independent curation and programming, free expression and exchange of work and ideas, and the potential of art to challenge, question and provoke”.

Even with the best of intentions, it is almost impossible for Government departments to match this commitment. Challenging, questioning and provoking are not, in the Civil Service lexicon, terms of praise. And, in a sense, they shouldn’t be. The first concern of civil servants should be with being responsible, careful and accountable. But the responsible and careful questions that could be asked of a work of art – is it fair and balanced, does it represent the views of the nation, is it showing the most useful image of the country? – are exactly the wrong questions.

What we need to project abroad are independent thought, free expression, provocative imagining – the idea of a culture mature, dynamic and self-confident enough to be constantly testing its boundaries. If Culture Ireland is abolished we will end up with a version of Ireland abroad so bland and safe that we’ll be pining for the old vulgarities. Bring on the dancing leprechauns.