Cothu hails £10.2m support

Business sponsorship of the arts has increased almost seven-fold to £10.2 million in 10 years, figures released yesterday by Cothu, the Business Council for the Arts, reveal.

Cothu, a registered charity funded by its 150 company members, promotes links between the arts and business and its latest survey is based on replies from 440 arts organisations. The charity has also calculated that, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, business sponsorship of the arts ranks higher, at 0.02 per cent in Ireland than eight other EU countries for which data are available and than the US and Japan.

"If you are trying to raise awareness, it is perhaps easier to do it in a country which has a small population," said Mr Gerry Watson, Cothu chief executive. Mr Greg Sparks, of Farrell Grant Sparks, which conducted the National Arts Sponsorship Survey with the ESB, said that business and arts were linked in that they instilled national pride, whether it was U2 or Iona Technologies, Bailey's or Neil Jordan's films.

"Riverdance, the show, would not have been launched without business sponsorship," he said. Cothu points to the transition of arts activity in the last 10 years from a small number of events to a plethora of activities which are now a tourist attraction in their own right.

Apart from the worthiness of supporting artistic talent, community awareness and helping new productions to be discovered, sponsorship can raise a business's profile through the targeting of a specific, often localised, audience.

"You can very much get into your target group and select them in quite a rifle shot way rather than a shotgun way," Mr Watson said. The survey found that arts spending by businesses amounted to £10.2 million in 1997 - a rise of 38 per cent on 1995 - with banks/building societies and the food and beverage sector contributing £3.8 million. Arts festivals are the fastest growing recipient of sponsorship, taking 9.7 per cent of the sponsorship spend (£990,000) in 1997. Cothu maintains that, in a saturated media market, arts sponsorship can provide a useful communications channel. Mr Watson, a former corporate banker, gives the example of Nortel, the Canadian-owned telecom equipment manufacturer, which has been associated with the 21-year-old Galway Arts Festival from the early days and has evolved as the main sponsor of its theatre programme.

In contrast, Murphy Brewery won a Cothu prize last year for its sponsorship of the Cape Clear Storytelling Festival, in Co Cork.

People always think of the corporate entertainment component of arts sponsorship, he said, but this forms only a small part of the overall national sponsorship. He said that community and school-based arts comprised an important part of the spectrum. "We find that companies are very happy to take part in these and are willing to take risks," he said. Cothu, however, sees a need to set down a code of good practice between sponsors and arts organisations. "Inevitably as the business grows, it is something that comes up," he said.

But, he added, it was "very, very rare" for businesses to put pressure on arts groups not to include controversial material or to influence the agenda. "The people who run the arts are truly the most extraordinary professional people you will meet and very few will allow themselves to get drawn into sponsorship arrangements which impact on their artistic integrity."