Arts Council’s attacks on Government a strange strategy

The Arts Council has not been happy with the Government. In October, on the day of Paschal Donohoe's budget speech, the council's chairwoman, Sheila Pratschke, issued a statement expressing "huge disappointment" about the 2018 budget allocation for the arts.

She said the council’s lower-than-expected allocation would “severely hamper our efforts to broaden support to artists and organisations nationwide”. She declared: “We need a commitment from Government that we will have a significant uplift in investment from 2019.” And she seemed to be suggesting a quavering faith when she said, “we trust that the Taoiseach and Government will stand over the promise to double funding to the arts and culture sector by 2024”.

The council’s own increase was only 4.6 per cent. There’s certainly no gainsaying the fact that similar rises in future years would greatly extend any timetable for doubling the council’s funding. But if you pool the allocations for the Arts Council and Creative Ireland, the combined rise is 9.3 per cent. At this rate, the doubling target would take eight years to reach rather than seven. Creative Ireland is officially described as “the Government’s Legacy Programme for Ireland 2016 – a five-year initiative, from 2017 to 2022, which places creativity at the centre of public policy”.

At the end of October, the council’s deputy chair, the poet and academic John McAuliffe, entered the fray in these pages. Among other things, he suggested “the independent arm’s-length relationship between arts funding and the Government, so vital to transparent and merit-based decision-making, has been called into question”.

This album changed my life: Elliott Smith – XO (1998)

---

SHINee lead singer Jonghyun dies at the age of 27

---

A sequence of visions of Chopin

---

His target was not the Taoiseach but the then Minister for Culture Heather Humphreys. His claim is that she "reallocated" €5 million – of what he apparently presumes to have been an Arts Council entitlement – to Creative Ireland.

McAuliffe lampooned Creative Ireland as “part-car, part-temple, part-group-hug and part-energy-drink” and suggested that “what is most striking is the reboot of that organisation’s role, as an alternative agency for funding the arts, that is, performing a role legislatively enshrined as the Arts Council’s”.

But the legislation, the Arts Act 2003, states explicitly that "The Minister shall promote the arts both inside the State and outside the State". And says further that: "The Minister may, in the performance of his or her functions under this section, consult with – (a) the [Arts] Council, and (b) such Ministers of the Government, public bodies or other persons as he or she considers appropriate." (The italics are mine.)

In other words, as you would expect, it is the Minister who runs the show. And the Minister is not actually obliged to consult with the Arts Council.

In terms of the Arts Council being the enshrined agency for funding the arts, McAuliffe seems not to have noticed that just one national cultural institution, the Abbey Theatre, falls under its remit. Not a single national cultural institution created in the lifetime of the council itself has been put in its care by being entrusted to its funding regime. All of the new bodies, rightly or wrongly, have been directly funded through a Government department.

The wisdom of the chair and deputy chair of the Arts Council having a go at the Taoiseach and the Minister for Culture has to be questioned. Pratschke and McAuliffe are free to believe their attacks are the optimal way to get an uplift in Arts Council funding. But they would be wise to consider the possibility that biting the hand that feeds them is at best a dodgy strategy.

Public spat

On the other hand, to take but one example, the council’s unpleasant public spat with Aosdána, which included harsh treatment of an eminent, elderly artist, can surely have done the council no favours with either the Minister for Culture or the Taoiseach.

It speaks of heartlessness over an amount of money that’s definitely minor in the context of the council’s overall budget. And the way the council communicated with Aosdána about proposed reforms had resonances of the worst kind of authoritarian bureaucracy.

On this level alone, the council’s 2018 budget allocation could be seen as an instance of what goes around comes around.

But the issue that both Pratschke and McAuliffe are so clearly fearful about is much bigger. Leo Varadkar's commitment to double arts funding was made in Taking Ireland Forward, a "Policy Ideas Paper" he issued as part of his campaign to become leader of Fine Gael and, ultimately, Taoiseach.

“We will double the Government budget for arts, culture and sport over seven years,” it says, and goes on to talk of extensive investment in the national cultural institutions, resourcing Creative Ireland, prioritising increased funding for arts in education and developing a national network of musical instrument banks.

It must be clear to the dogs in the street, though not apparently to the mandarins in Merrion Square, that the Taoiseach could fully meet his commitment to double arts funding without coming remotely near to doubling the funding of the Arts Council.

The Taoiseach has recently taken to making his meaning absolutely explicit. The doubling of funding he is committed to will not be going exclusively to bodies like the Arts Council. He did so again this month at the inaugural Creative Ireland forum on culture, wellbeing and the creative society that was held at Dublin Castle.

The council has long felt free to behave with the kind of latitude associated with monopolies. It’s no wonder the council has been having difficulty accommodating to the idea of a more competitive world in which a range of its long-standing behaviours may no longer be apt.

If it fails to adapt, it may find itself falling behind the competition.

mdervan@irishtimes.com