Culture in Northern Ireland is a concept which is defended and promoted by the two political traditions of nationalism and unionism with a ferocity that is often frightening. One man's culture is another man's coat-trailing exercise. As part of the new Northern Assembly, a Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure has been founded. It is the first time in the history of Northern Ireland that there has been such a department. Previously, the (much criticised) Arts Council of Northern Ireland answered to the Department of Education.
The first minister of the new department is Michael McGimpsey of the Ulster Unionist Party. His appointment caused much surprise in nationalist circles where it was thought that Sinn Fein's Bairbre de Brun would take the ministry, given its brief to promote the Irish language. It says much about nationalist preconceptions that little thought was given to the fact that unionists might have an interest in arts and culture (there are those who think Nationalists have culture; unionists have Lambegs).
Yet, in retrospect, it is not in the least surprising that DCAL (as it is known locally) should be so prized. A department with a small budget of £64 million, it cannot be regarded as being big in fiscal terms. Nonetheless, it may well have an influence in moulding a common vision of Northern society which will far outweigh its very modest purse. As well as arts and culture, its brief includes sport, museums and libraries, inland waterways and languages.
McGimpsey is a man under pressure. Anyone who thinks that he is Minister for Fun should have been there the day he was interviewed, when McGimpsey was utterly wiped out with tiredness. His department - one floor in a building in Belfast city centre - has an air of newness about it. The names of officials and offices are written on paper and stuck on doors. His own office says simply "Minister" but when addressed as such, he replies "Call me Michael." Security, too, is unobtrusive. Gone are the days when jeep-loads of soldiers and police would clear whole streets in the expectation of visit of a NIO minister.
Starting wearily, McGimpsey answers questions with studied effort. After a while, the effort disappears. He seems genuinely interested. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he gained a BA in Economics, History and English in the mid-1960s, he has a "very good grounding" in Irish drama and poetry and a great interest in history. He likes "most forms of music . . . except jazz" and blames that shortcoming (if such it is) on a lifetime of listening to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen on the radio while looking for rock 'n' roll.
An interest in the arts is "something you develop and I was lucky in that my education helped me and I also read a great deal when I was growing up." Currently, he is reading Elizabeth by David Starkey, about the queen who defeated the Armada and planted Ulster. She is "one of my favourite characters in history. To be a woman and achieve what she did . . . "
In literature he admits to loving "Evelyn Waugh, just purely for his use of language. It is so rich . . . I've read Brideshead half a dozen times." More surprising, perhaps, is his admission that he is "very fond of Sir Walter Scott. I would occasionally list Ivanhoe as my favourite novel but that's true because it has got the works." It's another novel which he revisits and has read on a number of occasions.
(It is odd, too, how little comments like that resonate. Ivanhoe was translated by the Donegal Irish-language writer, Seosamh Mac Grianna, in 1937 for the then newly established government agency in Dublin, an Gum. Mac Grianna, a Romantic, would have approved of McGimpsey's choice.)
McGimpsey lists Sean O'Casey as his "favourite dramatist" - "I have a passion for him" - and candidly admits to having "read a bit of Shakespeare as well but I find it nearly has to be explained to me." A Midsummer Night's Dream, he describes as the "Black Adder of its day" which would have "people rolling in the aisles". In short, he says, "I'd be fairly broad ranging, catholic in my tastes, shall we say, in what I like."
Although McGimpsey took up his brief in November 1999, the Assembly lasted only 72 days before collapsing in February. Now, just weeks after its re-establishment, the process of agreeing an agenda and programme for government is starting slowly. McGimpsey hopes that that process will be complete by the end of the year.
In the meantime, he lays out his own stall for the arts - more money and more imagination. "Our needs are greater in Northern Ireland because we have fallen so far behind," he says. He regrets the money that has been spent on security and security-related enterprises as money that should have been invested in Northern Ireland and he is aware of the disparity in funding between the arts in the North and in Great Britain: "Arts in Northern Ireland has been seriously and badly underfunded . . . We estimate to bring us up to Scottish level we need a 40 per cent uplift . . . I think it's a 16 per cent uplift to take us up to the British average."
Government has a central role to play in arts and culture, he says: "When you talk about the arts and the muse and the genius and all the rest of it, the reality is that all of this requires support from government, and there is a cash implication. The thing about the arts is very small amounts can produce big outputs. We don't need tens of millions of pounds in this department . . . we need small amounts of money, small amounts that for other departments are just small change but for us is the sort of difference between the arts sector going forward or stagnating."
He cites the Republic as a model for imitation: "I also think that when you look at the Irish Republic and the way in which they have been able to get funding for the arts - they go to central government and they go to alternative means. I think trying to have a relationship with big business works down South and getting in the advertising budgets from the big companies is a way forward . . . We're looking for money the traditional way and we're looking for, shall we say, creative, inventive means of getting resources. One thing we are certain of is that the resources we have are inadequate. We have ideas and plans throughout the sector, for arts in particular."
One such project already completed was the Future Search conference held in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, in May. A three-day think tank, it brought together a variety of arts practitioners, critics, administrators and arts workers to begin the process of visualising and imagining the role of the arts in the North. The event impressed many of the participants, giving them an opportunity to pitch their ideas to the highest echelons of DCAL.
For McGimpsey the arts have a dynamic, imaginative and fiscal role to play in the new Northern Ireland. Arts give value for money through cultural tourism. What will tourists do during a "wet day in Enniskillen", he asks? "Cultural tourism is a benefit," he says. Money spent on the arts is not thrown away. It creates jobs, makes money, and gives value. "It's not only personal development; it's not only creating a new image amongst ourselves, for ourselves . . . there is something quantifible there," he argues.
"As far as I can see . . . investment in the arts sector is money well spent, especially amongst our young people, bedding creativity in the educational process, providing our kids with those sort of tools that . . . give them confidence and skills, allow them to nurture their talents and allow them also to, I think, make a living and prove that they are people who employers will want to employ."
It should be noted that in one of his last acts as minister before suspension in February, McGimpsey told the arts sector that there was no extra money for them this year. Further, the money available would not even be in line with inflation and was, effectively, a cut. Where there might have been the temptation to bluff it out, McGimpsey was honest. It wasn't good enough, jobs were at risk, more money was needed and he wanted to get it, he stated.
He regards the Arts Council of Northern Ireland as a boon. The council is an intermediate funding body and that is the "best way" for the arts to be funded, he says, "rather than us as a department - with the best will in the world - saying who gets what. We are not here to make those value judgements."
He believes that membership of the council is well-balanced in terms of geography and disciplines and has "best people, together with professional development officers, to make those value judgements about who should be getting funding and how much money they should be getting".
Nevertheless he says, there "has been a perception that the Arts Council has been more elitist than it should be" and that the "arts to an extent are seen through the Arts Council, as being for `high art' and that areas such as community-based art are getting left behind."
However, McGimpsey doesn't see his role as just channelling monies into the council's coffers and forgetting about it: "I don't see us as administrators . . . We will play a much more pro-active role. Yes, we will find resources; we are looking to encourage; we are looking to support; we are looking to reinforce; we're looking to broaden the people who are involved through inclusion and accessibility right down to the schools if we can.
One of the responsibilities of the department is language - Irish, Ulster-Scots and those of local ethnic communities. He adopts a pluralist attitude: "The language, I think, is one of the exciting parts. It was seen originally as one of the divisive sides to this dept, one of the divisive sides to the Agreement. I don't see it like that at all. I think it is one of the important parts."
On a personal level, he says, "My name is McGimpsey, so by definition it is Gaelic. I have no hostility at all towards the Irish language. I think it's all part of our culture and it's a culture we all share."
"Diversity," he argues, "is a strength, not a weakness" and envisages a future in which Irish and Scots Gaelic and other languages link up: "We're all part of a bigger jigsaw."
He is happy, too, that the use of language is changing for the better: "We've gone in terms of perception, not least thanks to the Agreement, from the statement `Every word spoken in Gaelic is another bullet fired' . . . we've gone a long way beyond that."
Sharing, not scaring, is the aim: "Nobody is trying to take over anybody. What we are trying to do is enjoy what we have."
