Vita brevis, ars longa

The Arts: Charles Haughey actively supported the arts. Paddy Woodworth examines an influence on cultural affairs that continues to generate debate.

Anthony Cronin: Charles Haughey's arts policy was deeply influenced by the views of this friend from his student days.

Charles Haughey's record in the arts, as in most other areas, is a subject which can generate fierce controversy. However, even his harshest critics must concede that, until the advent of Michael D. Higgins in the new Ministry for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in 1994, no other senior politician in the history of the State had taken such an active and positive interest in cultural affairs.

The same critics would add that this exposes the dismal record of his peers rather more than it reflects glory on the former Taoiseach's arts policies.

Nonetheless, the credit side of the record is substantial. The core of Mr Haughey's arts policy was a concern for the material well-being of the individual artist. He personally cultivated sculptors, painters and poets and bought their work - though his personal generosity seems less impressive in the light of subsequent revelations about his finances.

His arts policy was deeply influenced by the views of a friend from his student days, the poet and novelist, Anthony Cronin, who was appointed as his arts adviser after he became Taoiseach in 1979.

A decade earlier, as Minister for Finance, Mr Haughey had introduced tax-free status for artists. This measure was widely praised, at home and abroad, for its imaginative approach to arts funding. As he himself subsequently recognised, however, in an interview with this newspaper, "it was more a gesture, a symbol, than anything else. It was meant to be a statement by the establishment that we valued the creative people in our society . . . that we wanted them to stay and work in Ireland."

In reality, the measure may have done more to attract foreign writers, often of no particular artistic merit, to use Ireland as a tax haven, than to benefit our own creative people. And like all such measures, it benefited those who were already highly successful much more than those who were struggling for recognition.

Mr Haughey's other major contribution to arts policy, the establishment of Aosdana, in 1981, has had a much more tangible effect on the daily lives of ordinary Irish artists. Aosdana is a self-governing artists' association. It provides a modest annual stipend that enables its members, where they do not already make a living from their art, to concentrate on their artistic work without the necessity to take non-artistic employment.

At a stroke, this scheme removed hardship from the lives of many artists, and has made a significant, if unquantifiable, contribution to the creation of new Irish art. While its limitations and internal politics have rightly attracted hostile criticism, it is Mr Haughey's best monument in the arts community, and arguably one of his best legacies.

A controversy about the genesis of Aosdana, however, ultimately revealed that events of a GUBU nature occurred even in this relatively benign area of Mr Haughey's activities. In 1991, a history of the relationship between the State and the arts in Ireland, Dreams and Responsibilities, was published by the Arts Council. The author, Dr Brian Kennedy, inclined to the view that the credit for initiating Aosdana belonged with a former director of the Arts Council, Mr Colm O Briain, rather than with Mr Cronin.

After initially publicising the book with great enthusiasm, the council's then director, Mr Adrian Munnelly, told his officers that he had given Mr Cronin an assurance that he would no longer actively promote it. Mr Cronin has always denied seeking or getting such an assurance, but Mr Munnelly subsequently had the book displayed for sale with Mr Cronin's version of events attached to it by a rubber band, a device which was christened "the intellectual condom".

Mr Munnelly shredded some 200 copies of the book, without informing the author. This was an unprecedented action by a director whose personal integrity was highly respected. Mr Munnelly reaffirmed his belief in the book's value and accuracy when challenged to account for his action by the resignation of one of his officers, Ms Emer McNamara, but it was not republished under his directorship. That the book also recorded the less-than-happy relationship between Mr Haughey and the council in the early 1980s inevitably created speculation that the Taoiseach himself would not have been displeased to see the book drop from view.

Knowing what we know about his high-handed actions in other areas has made it harder to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he really was as distant from this unsavoury little episode as he claimed in the Dáil.

Mr Haughey was also closely identified with two other arts controversies, both of which could be properly described as monumental, and both of which had much happier outcomes than the book-shredding debacle. These were the establishment of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the development of the Temple Bar area of Dublin as a "cultural quarter".

The decision to locate the long-awaited IMMA in the recently restored Royal Hospital in Kilmainham was very much the initiative of Mr Haughey, Mr Cronin, and the then Secretary of the Taoiseach's Department, Mr Padraig O hUiginn, another influential figure in many of Mr Haughey's cultural projects.

That decision was criticised in many quarters, both on the grounds of the museum's location outside the city centre, and because it was feared that the conversion would violate the integrity of one of our most valuable 17th-century buildings. And the museum has now firmly established itself as a stimulating arts venue, though it has also had its problems.

However, the conversion of the building has received at least as much praise as blame from national and international critics.

The development of the Temple Bar area in Dublin as an ambitious "cultural quarter" also attracted well-informed criticism. There were fears that working artists who had flourished there, however uncomfortably, when the district was run down would soon be priced out by its transformation into a trendy tourist zone.

Some of these criticisms were taken on board, and provisions were made for the housing of a number of resident artists in greatly upgraded studios. The jury is still out on Temple Bar´s innovative mix of new and established cultural institutions. Arthouse, an avant-garde multi-media facility, has closed down but the Ark, a children's cultural centre, has gone from strength to strength.

The debit side of Mr Haughey's arts record remains significant. His abolition of the Irish Film Board, since restored by Michael D. Higgins, is remembered by many as his most costly error, at a crucial moment for the development of the Irish film industry.

He was also ultimately responsible for the series of unpardonable delays which fouled up the organisation of Dublin's year as European City of Culture in 1991.

More generally, he sometimes seemed to regard the disbursal of arts funds as a function of his personal patronage. He used his own Department to funnel National Lottery funds to the arts, seriously undermining the role of the Arts Council for a period in the late 1980s.

Indeed, despite a commitment to creating "a comprehensive policy for the arts in Ireland" in an impressive 1972 speech in Harvard University, planning ahead for the arts was always Mr Haughey's blind spot. He was ambivalent on this issue, sometimes endorsing long-term planning and sometimes dismissing it in favour of a quasi-mystical view that good art would just "bubble up" regardless of whether it was adequately supported or not.

He signally failed to create a secure infrastructure for cultural activity. The result was a haphazard network of chronically underfunded arts institutions, which failed badly to fulfil their potential in the service of the arts, artists and the public.

Mr Haughey did recognise, in an Irish Times interview in 1991, that the Arts Council was underfunded, but then failed to find the relatively small sums needed to honour his commitment to remedy that situation just before his exit from politics in February, 1992.

This suggests that the arts were really rather low on Mr Haughey's list of priorities, despite his well-intentioned rhetoric. He certainly missed a golden opportunity to exit smelling of roses in this particular sector. He left behind him a series of unresolved structural problems, but he also left a legacy of individual achievements for which many warmly remember him.