Fintan O’Toole: Britain, send your creative refugees our way

Rachel O’Riordan from Cork is just about to take up the job of artistic director of one of London’s major theatres, the Lyric Hammersmith, having previously run the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.

Britain’s biggest mainstream arts festival, the Edinburgh Festival, has been run since 2013 by Dubliner Fergus Linehan, whose contract has been extended to 2022. Its biggest non-mainstream festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, is run by Shona McCarthy from Northern Ireland.

Ciarán Devane, chief executive of the British Council – the state body for the worldwide promotion and projection of British culture – is from Dublin. John Gilhooly, who has been executive director of Britain' leading classical music venue, the Wigmore Hall since 2002, is from Limerick. He is also chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

Irish-born people are disproportionately represented in leadership positions in English, Scottish and Welsh cultural institutions

Anne Morrison from Belfast was until recently chairwoman of BAFTA. Gerry Robinson, from Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal, was chairman of the English Arts Council for six years from 1998.

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Louise Richardson, from Tramore, Co Waterford, is vice-chancellor (in effect chief executive) of the University of Oxford. And let's not even mention the BBC.

Robert Ballagh's recent letter to The Irish Times complained that the Abbey Theatre was "currently being run by two Scotsmen" (actually one Scot and one Welsh man) and that "practically every national cultural institution is being managed by an outsider.

For example, the director of the National Gallery of Ireland is an English man, the new director of the Hunt Museum in Limerick is a Welsh woman, the director of the National College of Art and Design is an English woman, and the director of the Gate Theatre is an English woman.”

Negative response

Most of the response was (rightly) negative. But, however clumsily, Ballagh did highlight a reality that deserves further reflection. He drew attention to one side of an equation.

It is true that English, Scottish and Welsh people have taken up positions of leadership in Irish cultural institutions. What he did not say, of course, is that it works both ways: Irish-born people are disproportionately represented in leadership positions in English, Scottish and Welsh cultural institutions.

If we were to expel all the British “outsiders”, retaliatory action across the Irish Sea would leave major institutions on both islands bereft of their chosen leaders.

And this is a long-established reality. The Gate and the Abbey, both objects of Ballagh's anger, are cases in point. The Abbey was partly established by an English woman, Annie Horniman.

Irish universities, for example, are receiving very high-quality English and Welsh applicants for senior and junior positions

When I first went to the theatre in 1971, its artistic director, Hugh Hunt, was English. One of its most successful subsequent artistic directors, Patrick Mason, was born in England and originally came to the Abbey as an assistant to Hunt.

The Gate was founded by Michael Wilmore (Micheál Mac Liammóir) and Hilton Edwards, both English.

Conversely, one of England’s most important theatre companies, the Royal Court, was created largely to present the work of an Irish man, Bernard Shaw, who was also a key figure in the creation of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada).

In literature Irish writers – including those from the Republic – pretty much take it for granted that they are eligible for and may even win any of the main British prizes. Even the most British of gongs, the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry, awarded by the royal family, is available to Irish poets from the North: both Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon have received (and of course accepted) it in recent years.

High dudgeon

While we enjoy nothing more than the high dudgeon that follows when one of ours is claimed as British, it is curiously absent when Anne Enright or Roddy Doyle or Sebastian Barry or Eimear McBride is garlanded in London.

What lies behind all of this is the reality that pretty much anybody involved in cultural creation knows that it is a field in which belonging is fluid, mobile, open and, in a positive sense, opportunistic. It doesn’t work very well within borders.

People who work with culture are not “citizens of nowhere” but they are innately cosmopolitan. The whole point about Irish people running British cultural institutions and vice versa is that they do it because they can – the differences of culture and language do not form significant barriers.

To put it like this is, of course, to invite the obvious question: what happens to all of this fluidity in the context of Brexit? Brexit may proclaim itself as a process of opening up: “global Britain”. But it undoubtedly draws on strains of isolationism and xenophobia.

The cultural back-and-forth survived the political upheavals. The chances are that it will do so again

It also – assuming it goes ahead – creates the biggest divide on these islands for almost a century, with the Republic being potentially forced to think of itself much more in continental than in archipelagic terms. Will this process slowly undermine the ease of cultural and intellectual movement between the islands?

One thing that’s obvious – because it is already happening – is that, at least in one direction, the flow will increase. There is a minor but discernible flight of intellectual capital from England and Wales: Irish universities, for example, are receiving very high-quality English and Welsh applicants for senior and junior positions.

And it’s important that Ireland welcomes such people with open arms: if there is a brain drain of creative people, we should be trying to catch as much of the outflow as we can. This is why Robert Ballagh’s crude message about “outsiders” was so badly timed. A torch should be shining across the Irish Sea: send us your Brexit refugees, your huddled masses of alienated creatives.

Exchange rate

What about the other direction, though? Will creative Irish people continue to see Britain as a bigger canvas on which to exercise their talents and imaginations? In a purely selfish sense, it might seem better if they didn’t – imagine all that ability applied at home.

But the fact is that we need this exchange more than ever. Ireland can no more float away from Britain than Britain can float away from continental Europe. If the political and economic ties weaken, the cultural ones will have to be strengthened.

We have, of course, one concrete experience of an exit: Ireland’s departure from the UK in 1922. After that there were cultural refugees, too, except going in the other direction, from Irish repression to the relatively greater freedom of expression in Britain. But English figures continued to operate in Ireland too.

The cultural back-and-forth survived the political upheavals. The chances are that it will do so again. But that all depends on whether and how Brexit happens and how nasty things get.

In the worst case, England in particular turns ever further in on itself and Ireland is blamed for the failures of the great project of liberation. In the best, the current agonies are the birth pangs of an overdue re-examination of who our neighbours want to be. We could actually help them with that.