The sound of silence may spell some sound reflection

ARTS: Don't assume it's out of fear that the arts sector has been quiet sincethe grants cuts, writes Declan Gorman, who argues the case for increased nvestment by Government in our cultural lives

As far back as 1990, the then Arts Editor of The Irish Times posed the question, why was it that Irish artists could collaborate on extraordinary street spectacles in protest at miscarriage of justice cases, but seemed reluctant to take similar militant action to highlight their own needs? In 1996, a delegate at a public meeting of the Theatre Review returned to this theme, asking why artists could not be more like the farmers of the day and take to the streets with their grievances.

In that year, the preferred medium of the protesting farmers was herding confused and incontinent sheep into the Department of Agriculture. The much more inspiring tractorcade protest of 2003 with the imagery it offered for memorable press photos suggests that it was the farmers who had learned a few lessons from artists in the meantime - about visual intelligence, event logistics and even the cumulative power of the week-long epic. In her article entitled The Farmer and the Artist Should be Friends, (January 14th) the current Arts Editor of The Irish Times asks again, however, whether artists in turn should have learned from the farmers. Why, she asks, have artists remained so silent in the wake of recent Arts Council cutbacks?

In my view too much - or too little - is being read into the silence of the arts. I think it implausible that artists are simply afraid to speak out, as has been suggested. Artists are typical citizens in this comparatively free democracy - as courageous and cautious as any group of diverse adults. I have regularly seen artists stand up at conferences and directly challenge powerful civil servants, senior Arts Council personnel and indeed Government ministers when the occasion demanded it. There is no lack of courage in the arts. The Arts Council and the Government by turn are accountable to citizens and are hardly so vain or silly as to be surprised by or to respond vindictively to criticism of unpopular actions.

The silence may be more ominous than timid. Or perhaps it is the silence that accompanies reflection.

My view is that what is needed in response to the recent shift in Arts Council policy and priorities is a measured analysis, not a cathartic rush to press or to the picket line. I believe this is precisely what is happening. Out of such analysis can come a clear framework for questions, not just to the Arts Council, but to Government, to society and to ourselves. And out of the responses will come appropriate action to ensure that what appears to have happened in 2002 can never be allowed to happen again.

I say "what appears to have happened" because the full picture is still not clear. What does seem indisputable is that there has been serious cutting of core grants to organisations by a State agency, without adequate prior warning to the affected clients. This is at best a discourtesy, whatever the rationale.

On a grander scale, there has been a crude slashing of key budget lines by the Arts Council. While this is clearly a knock-on effect of the cut to the Arts Council's own finances under Budget 2002, there has been an attempt to rationalise cutbacks in key areas as a first act in the implementation of the current Arts Plan. This rationale requires interrogation, as indeed does a central tenet of this, the least-debated and most contentious of all the Arts Plans to date.

The Arts Plan 2002-2006 states bluntly: "most (arts) organisations remain excessively reliant on Arts Council and other public sources of funds".

"Theatre organisations" we are informed "are . . . over-reliant on the Arts Council for income and support"; so too, "dance organisations are over-reliant on Arts Council funding" while "the scale and relative costs of opera production create uniquely heavy demands on public sector supports". In fact the Arts Plan asks us to "imagine a creative Ireland . . . where the arts are dynamic and self-reliant".

If self-reliant means stripped of public funding, and if the December 2002 raids on the production and presentation budgets for opera, dance and drama is a signpost to the future, I refuse as a citizen with cultural rights to participate in this act of imagining. It is fundamentally wrong. The arts must be publicly funded - generously so - and the current trend sends out disastrous signals.

It should be remembered what "public funding for the arts" actually means. The Arts Council's budget is part of the national fund that citizens have created and entrusted to Government through taxation in order to secure the planks of democracy and civilised society. Arts funding is the particular bit that they have invested to secure meaningful and quality cultural experience in their lives and the lives of their children. "Self-reliant arts" is a patent non sequiter. "Sustainable culture" and "sustainable arts", on the other hand, are proper aims of a civilised society. Sustainable arts should not be confused with unsubsidised or half-subsidised arts. Sustainable arts is arts that can enhance and preserve the fabric of society for years and generations. That costs money but it is money well spent.

The desire to reduce reliance or dependency on the Arts Council is not held exclusively by the Arts Council. It is shared by most thinking arts organisations. This desire should not be confused however with simplistic "exercises" in reducing grant levels to companies - particularly not in swift dawn raids. Nor should it give any comfort to the residual and ignorant tendency in some quarters to question the appropriateness of public funding of the arts at all.

It is the unquestioned hegemony and the perjorative language of the dependent relationship that artists wish to see replaced - not some tinkering with the level of cash disbursed.

If the Arts Council is to become a development agency in more than name and aspiration, it must cease to conceive of itself as a publicly appointed benefaction agency - a kind of heavily-burdened Self-Aid trust that nowadays sets achievement objectives where it once just gave handouts. Instead, the Council must articulate that Art, not Cash, is the key resource in this dynamic. It is artists, not arts councils or arts ministers, who provide their fellow citizens with the magical and spiritual means to reflect, question, celebrate, criticise. One key role of a developmental Arts Council is to channel increased - not decreased - public funds effectively towards experienced (and emerging) artists and organisations. Another is to collaborate with those organisations in debate and advocacy on the central place of art in the lives of citizens. The Arts Plan must be re-imagined around shared - not handed-down - objectives, which place sustainable art and people before cash or cost-saving indicators.

The implications of recent arts policy shifts will be considered, I am sure, by the newly-constituted Theatre Forum, as one strand of its multiple actions in this, its first year.

I imagine that umbrella bodies in other arts fields will be engaged in similar reflection, and that dialogues among these bodies are already underway. When we do eventually speak out it will not be to whinge about grant cuts but to require a total realignment of the way in which the cultural rights of Irish citizens are provided for.

The Arts Council is now just one player in an increasingly complex policy nexus that includes the Minister for Arts, Tourism and Sport; the European Commission and Local Authoritiesamong others. Governing all of this is a Department of Finance with hired-in advisers who appear to be ignorant of the realities of the arts in modern Ireland and modern Europe. We have a Minister for the Arts whose precise position on the Arts Plan and whose underpinning cultural philosophy have yet to be enunciated. The case for increased - not decreased - arts funding needs to be articulated by Minister O'Donohue well and loud, in advance of any attempted repeat of the 2002 Estimates farce. The compelling case for massive investment by other government and local government bodies into the cultural lives of citizens, especially children, needs to be acknowledged and acted upon at Cabinet.

Artists have been damaged, but by no means silenced by the regressive 2002 Government Budget and by the clumsy beginning made by the Arts Council to implementing its Arts Plan.

I should be very surprised if this summer ends without some very considered and forceful representations to the Minister from a confident and informed arts sector. Relish the silence, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . it may be the prelude to a stirring sound!

Declan Gorman is a playwright. He is currently Artistic Director of Upstate Theatre Project, Drogheda and a director of City Arts Centre, Dublin. He was Co-ordinator of the Arts Council's Review of Theatre in Ireland 1995-'96. This article is written in his personal capacity