Were is an Arts Council-funded play, it would have begun as a drama and ended as a farce. Anyone possessing even a passing acquaintance with cultural life in Ireland will know of the arts sector's fondness for the word "crisis". Unusually, of late, it has appeared in relation to the Arts Council's internal affairs. Yesterday evening, however, the Merrion Square institution issued a statement suggesting that the latest crisis was more imagined than real.
According to this statement, the council's members who had been attending a specially-summoned meeting wished to reiterate their "full support for the Arts Plan 1999-2001 and its implementation".
In a brief document of just three sentences, admiration was then expressed "for the enormous workload carried by staff at all levels" and appreciation for "the professional commitment and integrity of the Director and staff."
The "crisis" can be traced back to early October when it emerged through a report in The Irish Times that the Arts Council's staff, unhappy with the programme for the implementation of the three-year Arts Plan announced last July, were set to vote on industrial action. A week later the council itself was said to be meeting amid growing tensions.
To an outside observer this internecine dispute was simultaneously inexplicable and absurd. After all, when the Arts Council's new plan was announced during the summer, the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms de Valera, made a commitment to allocate sufficient funding for its full implementation.
So, at precisely the moment when the organisation had considerably more money to spend than ever before - some £34.5 million next year - a state of crisis was declared.
Finally, after more than a month of consistently poor press, the Arts Council opted to sort out its differences and once more present a united front. Accordingly, the council chairman, Dr Brian Farrell, yesterday called a special meeting of the members, from which all the organisation's executives were excluded.
That meeting, lasting more than four hours, led to the statement pronouncing full support for the three-year plan, for all the staff and for the council's director, Ms Patricia Quinn.
Afterwards, Ms Quinn was terse, merely declaring: "I look forward to a meeting early next week of the council's executive committee to discuss the outcome of today's meeting." No doubt there will soon be other cultural crises, but they will be for the Arts Council to resolve, not summon into being.