POLITICS:JUST OUTSIDE the Co Clare village of Ballyvaughan, on the road to Corkscrew Hill, is a striking amalgam of disparate buildings – a late medieval tower, a traditional two-storey farmhouse, a courtyard of converted outhouses and a large, angular, modernist studio. They make up the Burren College of Art, an international art school founded in 1994.
The Burren college (full disclosure: I am a member of its advisory board) is a tangible example of what many people have been talking about of late: the use of art and creativity to regenerate an economy. Like many picturesque villages, Ballyvaughan has long depended on two industries: farming and tourism. One is in long-term decline, the other is seasonal. Michael Green, a local man, had the crazy notion that a world-class art school could be established. It would draw on the resource of the local landscape and culture, and bring extra life to the area. It would also bring in students during the college year, which happens to be the off-season for tourism. It was a brilliant but seemingly impossible idea. Yet, even after his tragically early death, it became a reality in 1994 through his wife Mary Hawkes-Green.
The Burren College of Art is now a recognised international school, awarding post-graduate degrees through NUIG. It brings money into the area (and into Ireland – most of the students are American). It is also sustainable, community-based and not run for profit. And it has ambitions to develop into a larger hub for creative thinking and activity.
The Burren college embodies both the challenge and the opportunity of making the most of one of the few assets Ireland has left – its reputation in the arts. It has to deal with the problems of relative peripherality and of poor infrastructure in areas such as broadband and public transport. But it shows that these can be outweighed by stuff that we often think of as abstract – the allure of Ireland as a special physical landscape and a place with a long and extraordinary history of artistic achievement.
Most people who think about such things know, in principle at least, that globalisation has altered some of the basic assumptions about the relationships between people, place and economics. Richard Florida has pointed to the emergence of a mobile “creative class” in the global economy and argued that, whereas in the industrial age people followed jobs, now jobs follow creative people. Employment is attracted to areas with a high creative reputation. That reputation is made by people who themselves are attracted by a range of intangible factors – including quality of life, imagery, landscape and historic resonance.
Sceptics may wonder whether all of this can mean very much in Ireland’s dire economic circumstances. Arts Council-supported organisations provide around 3,000 jobs – a significant contribution but not one that is ever likely to be crucial to economic regeneration. The gross value added of the cultural sector is €782 million a year – again, not to be sniffed at but relatively small in the overall context of a nation in economic meltdown (It is less than half of 1 per cent of the total added value of all sectors of the economy).
On a narrow view – like that taken, for example, in the McCarthy report on public spending – spending on the arts is at best an indulgence, at worst a waste of scarce resources. But this view is blinkered. For one thing, arts spending is rather cheap. In 2008, for example, the Arts Council spent €76 million but €54 million was returned through tax, leaving a net public cost of €22 million.
And the wider arts sector (including music, literature, publishing and cultural attractions) is a much bigger deal – it already supports 27,000 jobs and contributes nearly €400 million in tax. The admittedly more amorphous field of the “creative industries” (including software, broadcasting and advertising) is worth €5.5 billion a year – 3.5 per cent of value added in the entire economy – and employs nearly 100,000 people.
But where the opportunity arises is in the reality that even this return is far less than Ireland ought to be getting from its high cultural standing. The creative industries represent a significantly smaller proportion of Irish jobs than they do in leading global regions. We should be getting more bucks for our cultural bang.
This isn't about what artists are doing – they should simply be supported to get on with their jobs. It is about public policy. The Government framework document, Building Ireland's Smart Economysays, "We need to pursue an integrated policy framework to maximise the return economically, culturally and socially from sectors."
We don’t have that integrated policy, and Mary Hanafin’s primary job as the new Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport should be to create it. To do so, she will have to revolutionise official thinking. We have to stop thinking of spending on the arts as a luxury and start thinking of it as a developmental necessity, as the RD of an innovative economy and society. We should include artistic innovation in tax breaks for RD. We should start planning creative industry clusters like the one that has sprung up around Inveran in Connemara, initially to service TG4 but now running under its own steam. We have to create new and dynamic linkages between arts organisations, third-level institutes and technology companies. Above all, we have to start believing that making Ireland an interesting, culturally rich, place to live and work in is a better way out of the hole than turning it into a machine for servicing bank debts.
