Anyone who thinks the recent Arts Council row was about nothing more than the management style of its Director, Patricia Quinn, is missing the forest for one rather obvious tree. It has seemed clear for some time to many interested observers that the budget of the Council - which will hopefully be confirmed this evening in the Estimates to be £34,500,00 for 2000 - was too large, and the strength of the sector was too great, to be planned for by a body with the structure and culture of the Arts Council.

There needs to be policy for there to be planning, and this is the drum continually beaten in Brian P. Kennedy's magnificent history of the Arts Council, Dreams and Responsibilities (1990), which Patricia Quinn had reprinted soon after being appointed Director of the Council. Advances made since the appointment of Michael D. Higgins as the first cabinet Minister for the Arts, the ministry of Sile de Valera, the work of the Council chaired by Ciaran Benson, the appointment of Quinn as director and the appointment of the present Council chaired by Brian Farrell, thankfully make the book look extremely dated. Kennedy could write in his conclusion: " . . . there is still no clear commitment to a planned approach to the development of the arts in Ireland. Policy is fragmented and incoherent." He concludes: "With public support, adequate funding and intelligent planning, they (the arts) should have a bright future."

All of those elements are now in place, but the structure of the Council itself is creaking loudly and threateningly. The inadequate number of staff at the Council has long since reached crisis point: as is frequently quoted, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has 40 permanent staff members to administer a budget of £14.5 million sterling, while An Chomhairle Ealaion has 32.

The creaks are still louder from the non-executive, politically appointed Council. Sile de Valera was appointed Minister for the Arts in June 1997. She took a year to appoint a new Council, which meant that the new Council was facing into the summer and a brief autumn of furious activity before the next Arts Plan was due to be published. Furthermore, she appointed an almost entirely new Council, with only two members of the last Council remaining to establish continuity.

Two things were obvious at that point: that the new Plan could not possibly be published on time, and that the Council itself would have to rely hugely on the vision of the Director and staff if it was to deliver a Plan at all. In fact, the authorship of Patricia Quinn is quite obvious in many sections of the Plan. The sector is large and diverse, and the new Plan is the result of the accumulation of vast amounts of knowledge on arts practice - how could all the members of the new Council possibly achieve the level of expertise necessary to shape it? Was it not inevitable that some of them would fail to see beyond their particular arts activity? How could it have been avoided that some of them would feel their approval was being used as a "rubber stamp"?

The Minister has promised to review the legislation which set up the Council. It seems obvious that she should consider a "rolling" structure for the Council, replacing members on an on-going basis rather than with one fell swoop. An example of a board with this structure would be, say, the board of the IDA, where an average member sits for about four years.

The IDA board has 12 members and administers a budget of about £150 million a year. Why, then, does the Arts Council have 17 members to administer (this year) £28 million? Surely the numbers make it unwieldly? There are other problems. The ghost of the old culture of the Council as a senate of cultured folk who appreciate the finer things in life, which Brian P. Kennedy describes so well in his book, still lives. On the IDA Board, you see members from Bank of Ireland, AIB, Bord na Mona, ESB and Intel. The Arts Council cannot boast members from a similar cross-section of the leading cultural institutions. Culture is not money - it is more complex and more important - and it is good that smaller interests be represented, too, on the Arts Council. But the management of culture is an area of high expertise nowadays, and particularly when such a level of public funding is at stake, one would expect that more of the sector's acknowledged experts would be on the Council.

All of this is for another day. What matters now is that the ambitions of the Arts Plan 1999-2001, and the funding which Minister de Valera has promised for its realisation, aren't allowed to dissolve into thin air. On Tuesday the Arts Council publicly rowed in behind the Director; presumably those who are not happy with her management style have decided to grin and bear it. De Valera can best bandage the staff's wounds by coming up with funding for more staff. It would be a false economy not to do this - otherwise there can be no guarantee that the money she has allocated to the Council will be wisely invested.

And then we're back to aforementioned tree, Patricia Quinn's management style. When she was appointed Director in 1996, the former arts editor of this newspaper, Paddy Woodworth, warned that it might be a stumbling block for her and said she would have to launch a "charm offensive" if she was to "realise her considerable potential as director." Those words are ringing all too true now. No matter how high her ambitions, they will be nearly useless if she doesn't inspire her staff to contribute to them and believe they can be realised.