Don't bank on the arts

THERE are few occasions when you'd feel sympathy for a bank. Even in this era of po-mo banking, with every organisation striving to look all customer-friendly, cutting-edge and youthful, bankers are rarely viewed as ideal houseguests. No matter how many cool ads and lower-case rebranding campaigns are produced, the feeling persists that banks have your cash and are doing their best to hold onto it.

This belief probably explains the recent palaver surrounding the decision by Bank of Ireland to shut down its Dublin arts centre. The announcement that the excellent venue on Foster Place is to close didn't have a negative impact on the bank's share price, but it caused the blood-pressure of poets, concert promoters and other members of the arts militia to rise.

They were piqued, so they wrote letters to the papers and made phone calls to Liveline. Not surprisingly, such protests didn't inspire thousands to man and woman the barricades on Foster Place with poetry books in one hand and guitars in the other. But all of this attention may well focus minds on the real story here, which is the diminishing number of small-to-mid-sized venues in the capital city.

First, though, we have to get the red herring out of the way. When art pros step up to the micro- phone to deal with issues, you'll always seem to end up with a red herring. Here it's Bank of Ireland.

The role of a bank is to make cash for its shareholders, not to provide shelter for the arts. Sure, you can make much about the need for social and community responsibilities. You can get your PR to wax lyrical about how a business can express its soul (and assuage some corporate guilt) through a healthy relationship with the arts. But the bottom line is that shareholders are more interested in profits than platitudes.

That Bank of Ireland spent about a million euro a year over the past decade keeping the doors open on Foster Place for poets, singers and cello players is admirable. That the arts community has became so reliant on this says a whole lot more about the brutal venue situation in Dublin than any amount of reports cut and pasted together by a gaggle of art administrators.

About a year ago, we wrote about the erosion of the cultural infrastructure in Dublin brought about by the property boom. Where once stood music venues now squat grand canyons of Spars and apartments. As even the most nondescript backwater spur in the city centre has been mugged by the usual architectural cliches, the number of potential performance spaces has fallen.

All this with few squawks from the arts community. Bank of Ireland is a much easier target than those developers who know there are no easy wads of cash to be made from cultural pursuits. At least there's no pretence from that quarter about social or community responsibility.

Dublin's venue problem is really one of size. Every single new venue proposal seems fixated on providing big rooms and spaces. These are grand and dandy if you can fill the damn seats, but are absolutely no use when it comes to developing and nurturing new talent. There's a collective myopia about the need for smaller rooms. All that's required is some class of a stage, a sound system and seats. Open the doors and let the act pull in the crowds.

However, that could well be the real problem. For all the talk about how culture is part of Irish identity, there's very little support from the general public for new and emerging artists. This is something else we're quite happy to leave to the banks.