Tóibín says proposed arts cuts are cynical

NOVELIST COLM Tóibín has accused the McCarthy spending review group of “knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing” in cuts it is proposing to the arts budget.

Tóibín said the proposals, which included the withdrawal of funding for Culture Ireland, met Oscar Wilde’s famous definition of a cynic. As a member of the Arts Council, he said the organisation would face “very difficult decisions” about what small festivals it will fund in the future.

He predicted that the economic climate would make sports events and arts festivals “so valuable because there almost is nothing else over the next five years”.

The spending review group, chaired by economist Colm McCarthy, has recommended swingeing cuts in funding for the arts and sport. It identifies annual savings of €105 million in the budget of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism.

Tóibín said the proposed €4.6 million reduction, which would in effect shut Culture Ireland, was particularly short-sighted.

Culture Ireland is the State agency established to promote and advance Irish arts internationally.

“Culture Ireland is the only game in town if you are an ambassador for Ireland in any country and if you are seeing that there is any way of representing our country positively in the next five years,” he told presenter Myles Dungan on RTÉ’s Radio 1 Today with Pat Kenny Show.

“Yeah, get Culture Ireland and send in the Druid, send in The Gate and suddenly An Bord Snip Nua says get rid of that entirely. I know what that is called. It is called knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

The McCarthy report is also advocating a €6.1 million reduction in funding to the Arts Council and the scrapping of the Irish Film Board.

Tóibín is the curator of the literature strand at the Kilkenny Arts Festival where he will read from his sixth novel, Brooklyn, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He told the RTÉ programme that it was important to provide something for young people who will not have jobs or the option of emigration.

He said there was a need to create a “managed generation of unemployed people” who will have other outlets to express their creativity. He also predicted that there could be a flowering of arts and music in the next decade because of the disillusionment Irish people had with church and State.

Tóibín said the 1890s had been a time when politics had failed the Irish people following the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, but had led to an extraordinary flowering in the arts with artists such as WB Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Lady Gregory and the flourishing of the GAA as a national sports movement.

“I just wonder if we are going to have a replay of that decade which was an immensely rich decade for art and sport in Ireland at a time when everything else seemed to have failed us.”