The Irish Times - Thursday, October 15, 2009

Artists lobby politicians to maintain funding

DEIRDRE FALVEY Arts Editor

FILM PROJECTS in planning could risk being lost to Ireland because of uncertainty over the status of the Irish Film Board (IFB), Emmy award-winner Brendan Gleeson said yesterday.

In giving evidence to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Arts, Sport, Tourism, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, he gave examples from his own experience. He's planning an €11 million film version of At Swim Two Birds for next spring. But with film-making it is crucial that everyone "jumps at the right time", he said, and if the IFB was removed from the equation it would be a lost opportunity.

The film In Bruges led to a 30 per cent increase in tourism for that town, and that was "even after Colin Farrell's character called it a s***hole", he said, to laughter in the room. And a Ridley Scott film project about 12th century knight William Marshall is "there for the taking" for Ireland, Gleeson said. "Certainty and dynamism will seal the deal."

It isn't often you'd observe a TD asking an Oireachtas visitor for his autograph, but it was an unusually starry afternoon yesterday. So there was novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry scribbling something for Charlie O'Connor TD. There, too, writer Colum McCann, who must have known he had just been nominated for a National Book Award in the US, but kept schtum, and actor Gabriel Byrne.

The committee, presided over by new chairman Tom Kitt, was a two-pronged affair.

In the Arts Council corner were Gleeson, McCann, chairwoman Pat Moylan and director Mary Cloake; in the Theatre Forum camp were Abbey director Fiach MacConghail, Druid artistic director Garry Hynes and writer Barry. Gabriel Byrne, home for the funeral of a friend, dropped in to show his support.

Gleeson was impassioned about "the core value of the arts in the life of the nation", and "the primary economic imperative of sowing in order to reap". He spoke from experience, starting out with Passion Machine, with Arts Council support, in the last recession.

Dozens of careers were fostered there, and in the Project, and "the cultural dividend is pretty strong. If you add up the funding Passion Machine got over its lifetime and place it alongside the revenue the country accrued in the careers of those it nurtured, I think the country would be pretty much in the black. And that's just Roddy's Commitments on its own!"

McCann had flown from New York for the hearing, to give "some idea of what it means to be an artist, and to benefit from State support". He talked about the significance early in his career of a small Arts Council grant, which "gave me the best part of a year to write". Every country seems to be a friend of the Irish, because "we have had the privilege to tell our stories . . . and by protecting the Arts Council and artists we will allow that voice to be uniquely strong".