Transparency, Please

THE Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Mr Michael D Higgins, says that a recent Editorial in The Irish Times on arts funding presents distortions as facts, writes Paddy Woodworth. He goes on to inform us that the funding mapped out in the Arts Plan was an "optimum". This is useful clarification; it would have been more useful if Mr Higgins had made it when he launched the plan more than a year ago.

Readers with long memories may recall that Mr Higgins at that time acknowledged the need to find full funding for the plan. Not only was that extra £3 million never found in 1995, but the 1996 Arts Council funding falls short another three million.

The Arts Plan 1995-97, of which the Minister was so keen to claim "shared ownership" last year, has been grossly underfunded, and arbitrarily extended over five years. One assumes that the Minister did his utmost to extract the extra funds from the Department of Finance and failed. That happens, but it would be transparent to acknowledge it, and not pretend that everything in the arts garden is rosy. To present the missing funds as a sort of optional extra, when they have never been so described before - that smacks of distortion. And the Minister's implication that, as a result of the underfunding, all "development and expansion", "new projects" and "capital" are on hold will be news to the arts constituency, and possibly to the Arts Council itself, which has been curiously silent on the matter. The Minister signally fails to respond to our proposal that a more effective agency to promote the Irish arts abroad is sorely needed, though he seemed to accept that point in an interview on these pages two years ago.

He goes on to say that the National Library's plan was not approved by Government. That is not the Library's understanding, since the plan was approved and personally launched by Mr Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach. Furthermore, the plan presented to Mr Reynolds was fully costed, though these costings were not published. It has become painfully clear that the Library does not share Mr Higgins's upbeat assessment of recent funding provisions. Mr Higgins's undoubted commitment and vision for the arts sector would be better served by confronting these realities than by point scoring and re writing history.