The departure of Helen Carey to be the director of Ireland's first cultural centre abroad, the Irish College in Paris, creates a key vacancy in Galway.
She has been director of Galway Arts Centre and of Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and executive director of Galway Youth Theatre for the past two-and-a-half years, having worked in Bristol and London before that.
"It has been a short period," she says, "but I feel that this is an appropriate time for someone new to come in. When I started in November 1999, Galway Arts Centre was in a period of transition. I feel that this phase has now been completed and we have put structures in place for the future: the growth phase. The groundwork has been done for next year's Cúirt and the visual arts programme is in place until early next year. The next director will have time to find their feet.
"But it's not a one-person organisation. The team here [eight staff members, including full and part-time] is great, and the professionalism and expertise in both the Arts Centre and Galway Youth Theatre are deeply impressive. I'm proud of what we have achieved and without doubt it's one of the bedrocks on which I was considered for the Paris job.
"I feel very strongly about Galway," she says. "It certainly has been a very challenging time, not without its heartbreaks." As for her leap from Galway's left bank, Dominick Street, to the Latin Quarter: "it might not be as much of an adjustment as Galway - and Ireland - were when I came back in 1999", she says.
The position of director of Galway Arts Centre will be advertised within weeks, as well as the position of visual arts assistant, to replace Jill Power, who takes up a scholarship at the Art Institute of Chicago.
FOUR Irish artists will benefit from the Nissan Art Project 2002-2005, one of Ireland's largest visual arts sponsorships. Working with the Royal Hibernian Academy, Nissan Ireland has initiated a four-year scheme that will bring €130,000 worth of funding to Irish painters in mid-career who have not exhibited in Dublin in the past 10 years.
In a movement away from the public art installations that it has supported in recent years, the Nissan Art Project will now focus on gallery exhibitions, adopting what Nissan Ireland's executive chairman Gerard O'Toole calls "another method of exhibiting first-class work on behalf of highly talented Irish artists". Each of the featured artists will have an opportunity to exhibit his or her work for six weeks at the RHA. Its director, Patrick T. Murphy says the project "will mean that some of our most accomplished painters can be presented in a much deserved and long-awaited comprehensive exhibition and catalogue".
The project will commence with the work of Berlin-based Irish artist, John Noel Smith, whose works will be on display from September 6th to October 31st, 2002. Following Smith, the project will feature the works of celebrated painters Barrie Cooke, in 2003, Martin Gale, in 2004, and Stephen McKenna, in 2005.
THOSE who remember comic writer Karl MacDermott's series, Gone But Forgotten, in these pages last year, might want to listen to a dramatised radio version which starts today on RTÉ's Saturday comedy slot.
In Pooterish fashion, the series chronicles the lives of six Irish nobodies of the 20th century, who failed miserably in their chosen fields and gradually embraced oblivion. There's Tommy Tardy, the "step-uncle of Irish comedy"; Bridget Norrie Mee, a novice Irish aviatrix and failed world leader; Mad Dog Madden, a Chicago gangster; the Co Clare sporting enigma Manus Shanahan; hapless thesp Bertram Joyce; and the insignificant Irish novelist, Fiachra Kafka.
MacDermott - who performs along with Morgan Jones, Conor Lambert, Karen Ardiff, Deirdre Monaghan and Risteard Cooper - describes it as an aural antidote to our celebrity obsessed times.
It is on Saturdays at 11.02 a.m. on RTÉ Radio 1.
artscape@irish-times.ie