Cobh's guiding star by the sea

The Sirius arts centre, named after a historical ship, is keeping Cobh's arts community afloat, even through the hard times. Peg Amison, the centre's administrator, talks to Mary Leland

There's no through-traffic in Cobh. Nothing, I am told, comes into Cobh except from the sea. It is a cul de sac, its lovely hills and streets already sacrificed to the cars which pack the sea-front spaces, lining the avenues and alleys and dotting every vista with a shellac glitter. The parks and crescents face the harbour. From the shore the buildings mount in tiers to the crowning bulk of St Colman's Cathedral. There is no theatre, no cinema. Despite a crude eruption of new housing on the hills near Rushbrook there is no great demand for either, and both the efficient library and imaginative museum struggle to remain effective in the life of the town. There is no marina - an astonishing absence in this most maritime of communities, reputed home of the world's first sailing club. The town's two main interests, especially now that its economic mainstays of IFI and Irish Steel are gone, are said to be bars and hairdressing.

So how come Melanie O'Reilly's new CD, launched in Dublin on Wednesday has been sponsored by the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh? And what can explain the connection between the Army and the fine art photographer Simon Norfolk, who will travel with the Army to Kosovo and Liberia during the next 12 months to compile an exhibition which will be mounted both at Collins Barracks in Dublin and at the Sirius in Cobh? Or the year-long programme of gigs and concerts, readings and exhibitions, which keep these doors open day after day, month after month? Or the fact that the basement-based artist-in-residence scheme is booked out through 2005? Above all, what can be the reason for the survival, not to mention the successes, year after year, of this small organisation which can't provide even a single full-time job for its staff?

The answers to these questions are cheerfully supplied by administrator Peg Amison.

"We have a lot of links not only locally but with organisations like the Crawford Gallery in Cork, or the Triskel Arts Centre, and with people in Belfast and Dublin and the UK. Also, the visiting practitioners bring their own connections as well; for example, a sculptor from Japan was working with the National Sculpture Factory and had a residency here. And the performing artists really like the venue - they say the West Gallery is one of the best spaces in Ireland."

The Sirius was the first steamship to cross the Atlantic in a voyage which began in Cobh and ended in New York in 1838. Reflecting the achievement of Capt Roberts, from Passage West across the harbour, these premises continue to explore, and to link, the different cultures of the world. Commissioned by James Smith-Barry of Fota Island and opened in 1854, the building was designed as a yacht club by Anthony Salvin. The mosaic of the terrace is still decorated with the seal of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, successor to the Cork Water Club which was founded on Haulbowline Island in 1720. A later amalgamation of other clubs and the need for better moorings brought the RCYC to Crosshaven, where it has flourished ever since.

While from the street the Cobh building is simply an elegant structure, from the sea it seems to float in Italianate arches above the tide, its terrace, loggia and projecting roof the very ideal of a club for gentlemen of means and leisure, its double set of steps leading down to the water on either side. The harbour and the sea-borne traffic of the world which has congregated here for centuries remain crucial factors in the identity of the arts centre; the view is consistently outwards.

A native of California, Amison is a photographer who got a residency at the Sirius three years ago and, following an exhibition of her work here, applied for and got the post of administrator. It is a part-time position, yet it absorbs all her working life, an experience which also seems to be the case with her colleague, the painter Sarah Iremonger, responsible, with a selection panel, for the generous scope of programme criteria. This has a community element which can involve schools, retirement homes, the regatta committee, the YMCA or the hospital, integrating the generations through collaborations in creativity, while the residencies have involved artists of various prominence and great diversity.

The chosen practitioner lives in the basement flat for six to 12 weeks in the only part of the building which shows the great need for additional funding (though it includes a flowery south-facing terrace with the waves pounding below the parapet). In July, down here, Julie Bacon was working on a collage assembly of anecdotes and memorabilia related to the history of Cobh and its people; the aim of the residency programme is to invite artists reflecting ideas of identity, exile, time and distance, and also to offer Irish artists working abroad an opportunity to return home for a while. The consequent variety has brought people from South America, Finland, Europe east and west, Australia and Britain to Cobh; in tune with the ever-vanishing horizon beyond the guardian lighthouse, the list is expansive and exploratory.

Thus Melanie O'Reilly's song-cycle based on women in exile; thus, so long ago now, Patrick Ireland's Ogham installation, now carefully papered over so that the walls can be used for other things; thus Julie Bacon's outward eye on local art for the exhibition Eastart and thus the three-day maritime song festival where some of the musicians visited the local schools as well as holding a session of sea-shanties on the tall ship training vessel the Lord Nelson, which happened to be moored at the Deepwater Quay.

But things are pretty tight at the best of times; the Sirius has lost its literature officer SeáÓ hUigín, and with him the international flavour of a programme which introduced Annie Proulx - among others - to Cork. Also gone are the music officer and the gallery minder, employed through the Cork Arts Job Initiative.

"When that ended we simply couldn't afford to keep them on," explains solicitor, former physics teacher and former Chief Executive of CMP Dairies Derry O'Driscoll. Chairman of a board of directors trying to find the €170,000 required to complete the repair programme, O'Driscoll says that €50,000 would mean that they could get €125,000 in grants. They are trying to make up for time lost after the departure of the RCYC. By 1988 the place was in a sad state, although it was widely recognised as being, with the cathedral designed by EW Pugin, one of Cobh's most significant architectural attributes.

Its decline was halted by the decision to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Sirius crossing by buying and restoring the clubhouse and establishing the Sirius Trust. Peter Murray, Curator of the Crawford Gallery in Cork who lives in Cobh with his wife Sarah Iremonger, was a founder of the subsequent - and strongly-focused - Sirius Project, along with Ron Holland and Eddie English. This, with assistance initially from the Ireland Fund and support also from the Goulandris Foundation, the European Commission, the National Heritage Council, the Arts Council (which gives €55,000 anually) and Cork County Council (€19,000) has achieved so much of its objective that it seems a great pity that the funds needed to complete the job are still so hard to come by.

It also seems ironic; across the water at Ringaskiddy the sun highlights a multi-layered liner. From the Sirius terrace the great vessels arriving at dawn at the deepwater quay give the impression that a whole city has tied up overnight.

Untold wealth moors at Cobh, but little of it stays in the town. Instead, the Sirius centre, with its two fine galleries lit wonderfully by a kind of sea-light through the tall windows, works with the town council, with the East Cork Area Development group (which grant-aided the Melanie O'Reilly CD) and with anyone else it can find. Visual artists, practitioners of installation art, sculptors and photographers; vocalists or instrumentalists from jazz to the East Cork Early Music Festival, all use the spaces as they wish.

These are the core contributors to the Sirius success, for it is the singers and musicians who attract young people from the town and from other nearby centres including Cork city.

"We're enormously lucky that there's so much going on," says O'Driscoll. "It demands energy and hard work and it comes down to the person - in this case to Peg - who keeps driving it forward."

There are other ironies for Amison, who believes that the Sirius is run on passion: "artists come here and then go on to greater things, but no one knows they've been with us. But it's important for us that they come, so when a major performer like Juliet Turner comes in we try to keep our ticket prices affordable for a local audience while still managing to break even. The whole idea of this place first was to give a historic building a new life, and now it has become part of the community - that's the vital thing."