Madam, - While I must congratulate those who did well from the recent round of Arts Council grants - especially the first-timers - I am amazed to read that Galway has received a slap in the face.
The Galway Arts Festival receives no increase, the brilliant Galway Early Music Festival inexplicably has its grant reduced - and we at the Western Writers' Centre receive, for the sixth application in a row, no funding whatsoever.
As founder/manager of this centre, one of whose projects your newspaper featured in your edition of December 18th, I may be excused for thinking that the Arts Council has no intention of ever funding us. With apologies to Wilde, two or even three refusals might be caution; six in a row looks like policy.
The Western Writers' Centre (Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude) - which employs three staff and is the only one of its kind in the West of Ireland - has mounted courses, readings, even a modest winter festival, hosts a library of books, has set up workshops, worked with Galway Travellers' Support Group to produce a radio play, and has organised a weekend publishing seminar which was so successful that some who turned up to attend had to be turned away.
It is part of an art in education programme run in the Galway region, hosts a new writing page with a magazine, has two websites for new prose and new poetry. With Bus Éireann in Galway, we organised the Poetry on the Buses project, by which the work of local poets was displayed on buses in the city and county, in Irish as well as English.
We are funded by FÁS and, on an event basis, by the Ireland Fund, Galway County Council and Galway City Council, and have been sponsored recently or since our inception by the Munster Literature Centre, Lohan's (Galway), the Gulbenkian Foundation, Poetry Ireland and Easons (Galway), among others.
Yet never once by the Arts Council, even fairly recently when we sought funding to buy a single computer for our office. We are, of course, appealing against the decision. I would ask that you publish this letter so that readers might understand that the Western Writers' Centre is an established part of the functioning cultural face of Galway and that the Arts Council is refusing to fund an organisation which is not a first-timer, but has achieved a considerable number of innovative things since its inception.
We will be making a call for corporate funding - all the more vigorously now since it appears the council intends to "starve" the centre in the hope that it will go away. I fear that the centre may indeed fall victim to a particularly mischievous form of arts politics; in any case, it would appear that the council's attitude to the arts in Galway is becoming increasingly off-hand.
For inspection, our website is http://www.twwc.blogspot.com. - Yours, etc.,
FRED JOHNSTON, Circular Road, Galway.