Arts world sees hope in three-year plan

It may be a slim volume, but the Arts Council's new three-year plan will take some time to digest. Last week the Cabinet agreed to allocate funding to implement the plan in full, increasing Arts Council funding from its current level of £28 million to £37.5 million in 2001.

Launched on Thursday, the plan outlines a new approach to arts planning and policymaking. It redefines the role of the Arts Council as a development agency for the arts, rather than a funding body and it sets out broad objectives for the arts sector as a whole, rather than individual goals for the separate artistic disciplines.

The Arts Council will move from making annual funding awards to multi-annual funding. Funding decisions for different arts disciplines will no longer be separate. Instead, funding will be allocated for development needs of the arts in general, which are identified in the plan.

These include: increasing opportunities for children to engage with the arts by creating a joint committee on arts education between the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Art, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands; improving support for the arts at local government level through partnership with local authorities; and developing international audiences for Irish arts, in liaison with the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Siobhan Bourke: producer, Rough Magic Films.

I welcome the plan, applaud its coherence and ambition and the journey it hopes to take the sector on in the next few years. It's moving the arts centre stage and it poses a major challenge. My concern is that its effectiveness will be determined by the calibre and expertise of the council's decision makers. The plan talks about evaluating the sector but there is no mention of the evaluation of council members themselves.

The question of developing "performance indicators" is problematic. Excellence and innovation are the two key terms of the plan but how do you arrive at these value-judgments? How do you implement "models of good practice"? And of course, the question of the council's leadership versus partnership role is very tricky.

It's not clear from the plan how the council is going to develop the international dimension, which has huge potential. This needs a lot of attention in the next few years. The emphasis on arts in the education system is absolutely excellent and comes at the right time, when we have an innovative Minister for Education.

The establishment of pilot programmes for the agreement of targets in the next few months is going to be very labour intensive and needs to be carefully managed. I don't see how this can be done with the existing staff resources of the council but I think the council is well aware of the problems ahead.

Fergus Linehan: deputy director of Dublin Theatre Festival

It's very radical and really good. It is an admirable evolution from the last plan. It places the Arts Council in the context of a much broader infrastructure, in which its role is to provide a percentage of funding but also to foster the growth of the entire sector. It takes responsibility for the development of new areas, and this is a huge mind-shift for people. The new cross-disciplinary funding strategies pose an enormous challenge.

I don't think the council can do everything that's in the plan. It's going to take three years to establish benchmarks for evaluation, which don't yet exist. I'm sure the whole process is going to be extremely tough.

I don't think the plan articulates the underlying philosophy of the international dimension of the arts. This seems to be defined in economic rather than artistic terms. The related fact, that Ireland is an impending multi-cultural society, is not given any voice either.

The plan imposes a lot more accountability on the Arts Council, tying them to strategies that everyone agrees on. The aspiration towards a three-year funding cycle changes the role of council members from constantly deciding on grant decisions to evaluating what is innovation, what is excellence. It's certainly a long and painful journey away from the way things used to be done.

Colm O Briain: television producer; former director of the Arts Council

This is a very impressive document, which is assured in its approach and moves forward in dynamic ways from the first arts plan. The key to it is its view of the arts sector as multi-faceted. This is a very sophisticated step which tries to transcend blinkered thinking. It lays down a challenge to the sector to respond with imagination.

I would argue that the Arts Council has had a developmental role for the past 25 years but, as long as resources were chronically scarce, this role had to remain subsidiary to that of survival. Having succeeded in achieving what the first plan set out to do, it's appropriate, logical and timely that the council should become a development agency, working alongside the Minister and Department.

The relationship between the council and arts organisations is going to go through some changes, especially with regard to monitoring and evaluation. The council will have to find a balance and beware that its zeal for development doesn't draw it into setting inappropriate targets.

The plan is extraordinarily ambitious in its requirements for the council itself. I doubt if these can be achieved in the lifetime of the plan but even if it achieves half of what it sets out, that would be fantastic.

The question of staffing and resourcing of the council is a challenge to the Minister. There needs to be some initiative at a remove from the council to address its own understaffing and under-resourcing. The council deserves to be responded to in this regard.

Johnny Hanrahan: playwright, artistic director, Meridian Theatre Company, Cork

First of all, it's great that the principle of planning in the arts has been enshrined. The scale of this plan seems realistic in terms of sustainable growth in the sector and it presents an intelligent strategy for managing change. It has fantastic potential and if it's fluid it will work; if it's set in stone, it's a disaster.

But the vital question is the spirit in which it's going to be implemented. The Arts Council's desire to stimulate and challenge is a good thing but this could very quickly turn into manipulation. The rhetoric of the first plan suggested partnership. This plan is strong on leadership but it must also involve partnership in order to work, and this is not coming across as clearly as it should.

I'm not sure what the move towards a developmental role really means. Does the council know what it means? It's clearly not going to stay static, disbursing money annually, and that's great. Nobody who is creative should have anything to fear from change.

But there is a major issue around the scale and resources of the Arts Council's staff. All of the officers are very committed people, of high calibre, but the structure will have to become more sophisticated and less centralised.

The council will have to listen very carefully to the sector.

There is a major problem around evaluation, which will need intensive dialogue. There's no excuse for lazy or poor work but any "performance indicators" applied by the council will have to be very sensitive to the complexity of artistic evaluation. There is a danger of bringing in non-aesthetic goals. Aesthetic excellence should remain central to the agenda.

Martin Drury: director of The Ark, a Cultural Centre For Children

I think this is a welcome, timely and very radical plan, which seems to have two fundamental and related premises. The first is that the arts, as part of Irish public life and in receipt of public subsidy, need to be located within strategic public policy, planning and provision. So the conceptual framework of the plan is dominated by concerns that are more broadly socio-cultural than aesthetic, though not to the exclusion of the latter. The second premise is that of the Arts Council as development agency rather than a demand-driven funding body.

These are bold premises, rendered even more demanding in their implications by the fact that Government has accepted them and agreed to fund the plan in full. Among the questions arising is that of capacity. Does the Arts Council as currently constituted and as currently under-staffed have the capacity to deliver the plan? Does the sector have the maturity, self-confidence and in-house experience to engage with a very complex process? Sometimes people are more comfortable whinging than winning.

Jerome Hynes: chief executive, Wexford Festival Opera

This is a significant week for the arts, in which this provocative and challenging plan was published and the Government gave its commitment to fund it in full. We still have a long way to go in terms of arts funding but we should celebrate this moment.

This is a development document to which we have to respond. What's central to the plan is its emphasis on excellence and innovation in the arts. I am relieved to see this, rather than economic arguments for the arts. I also welcome the focus on the arts in education and the fact that significant moves are being made to liaise with the Department of Education. The aim of tackling the comparative neglect of the arts by local authorities is also excellent.

The move towards multi-annual funding of arts organisations has long been wished for and this will allow arts organisations to work in reasonable security, rather than lurching from year to year - from an increase in grant one year to a cut the next.

I feel that the move towards a development role for the council is a natural progression. It's a change from a hand-out relationship to the sector to a hand-up one. I don't believe that it would try to push organisations in particular directions. I don't think the sector would allow that to happen, anyway.

In this new era of funding for the arts, there are as many challenges facing the Arts Council itself as there are facing the sector. It will have to change the way it operates. The complete turnover of council members every five years will have to be changed, so that there's a degree of continuity, and to remove the sense of political hand-out about the appointments.

Declan McGonagle: director, Irish Museum of Modern Art

I welcome the shift for the Arts Council towards becoming an organisation that looks strategically at the area of culture and determines support for the arts sector in relation to that. This is an important change, which will benefit the entire arts infrastructure. It entails a new thinking process, introducing the possibility of a new transaction between the arts and society, between artist and non-artist. It emphasises that the arts are in society rather than apart from it.

This poses an enormous challenge to the sector. We've now been given the money, and this economic window of opportunity won't always be here. What we put in place now will last well into the next century and we have to really demonstrate that the arts can nourish the way we live, that culture is vital to a society. The sector will have to speak up, to grow up, get its act together and start making its case in a strategic way. The plan says Ireland is a different place now; let's deal with that.

The council's relationships with its clients are potentially difficult now and there will have to be intensive dialogue and debate rather than mumbling away in the background. The council itself will also have to operate differently and I'm concerned about whether it will secure the resources necessary to implement all the new objectives.

Una Carmody: cultural director, Temple Bar Properties.

This is a really ambitious plan, which I welcome. It poses an enormous challenge to all of us, asking us to become mature. I think that the Arts Council's move towards a developmental role is the right way to go and to some extent this was happening already with the last plan. I can only assume that the staff and resources of the council are going to be increased; otherwise none of this is achievable.

It is taking a new partnership or contractual approach to the sector, whereby goals will have to be agreed by everybody. The monitoring and evaluation process is going to be complicated, sensitive and difficult and I have no clear sense of how it's going to work in practical terms. I presume that a certain amount of funds will be made available under the headings of the various goals - for example, the development of arts organisations' capacity, and different groups will have to compete for this. This will be very hard to get right.

This aim of building capability in the sector is one I particularly welcome. We need to pool resources and information and move beyond the management immaturity which has prevailed in the arts until very recently.