Arts Council revamp looks to future

The Arts Council is hoping a that recent restructuring of its senior management team can help improve the support it gives to the arts sector.

The council offers information, advice and Government-funded grants to artists and groups working within the sector and is also charged with the task of stimulating public interest.

It recently announced three new additions to its executive team as part of a review of its management structure. Aidan Burke has joined as operations director, while Martin Drury will oversee work in the areas of festivals, venues, young people and children, artists and local development. Stephanie O'Callaghan will manage teams specialising in literature, visual arts, architecture, traditional arts and film.

Director Mary Cloake says the changes were made in response to the "magnificent growth" in the standards of how arts organisations are run.

"One of the big shifts we made in 2005 when we looked at our new direction was to say: 'Well, we have to understand the maturity and the professionalism of the arts sector itself and really respond to that.'"

More people are now moving between the arts sector and the private sector, something Cloake believes has resulted in the standard of management in the arts becoming much higher.

The council's latest review was designed to make the organisation more user friendly, according to Cloake.

"We achieved what we hope is a clearer alignment between the way the arts community operates and the organisational structure of the Arts Council. So now we have a team for music, a team of people for dance, opera, visual arts and so on.

"We have teams of people who will be able to respond in a very detailed, nuanced and knowledgeable way with the needs of those organisations."

The management is now split into three sections: arts, finance and a new operations department. Cloake says the operations department will take the burden off experts in the arts department, who can now focus on supporting artists rather than engaging in administrative work.

She believes this is vital given that the number of people trying to make a full-time living as an artist has quadrupled in the past five years, while the number applying for funding has doubled.

Outside of these administrative adjustments, Cloake says raising awareness of the arts is the biggest challenge facing the management team.

"People experience the arts all the time. If you turn the radio on in the morning and music comes out of the radio, people don't generally consider that to be an arts experience, but with many of those tunes . . . you can track them back to a little Arts Council grant somewhere, some time.

"Every household in Ireland is affected by the work of the Arts Council and one of the management challenges we have is making that a little bit more visible."

Cloake believes the restructuring can particularly benefit the living and working conditions of artists. "We did a survey about 18 months ago on theatre practitioners and the average wage of somebody who might be actually quite a famous actor was around €8,000 a year. The kind of rates of pay that artists, writers and musicians get for different types of work is quite poor."

To combat this, Toby Dennett was recently appointed in a new post as head of artists' support programmes.

Cloake says: "He'll be championing the living and working conditions of artists, doing studies and seeing how we can encourage organisations to pay them well and encourage better earning opportunities."

On an international level, Cloake believes there is room for improvement. "What I'd say is that, in Ireland, we are very successful in the arts in inverse proportion to the amount of time, attention and money we give them. If you look at what we put into the arts, the funding - although there's been very welcome increases in the last number of years - it's not anything like it is in Europe."

Cloake adds: "But the big area in which we could improve internationally is in the area of arts and education. Really, until the arts are a core part of people's education from the very time they go into preschool, it's always going to be difficult."