Sir, – Watching RTÉ 1’s The Frontline on Monday, it struck me that yet again we are being encouraged to adopt the Bordello Style Budget Package (BSBP) for arts funding. Listening to the emotive arguments regarding every current social anxiety, from the absence of hospital beds to the treatment of children with cancer, people working within the arts are expected to meekly accept cuts as if they made no useful contribution to our society.
But the arts are more than merely useful. They are transformational, and they reflect the dreams of the people of our nation, which are priceless. To sustain those dreams though, requires some small funding, because the making of art has a price, and those who create it have a right to live as equally as anybody else. Yet the fallacy seems to go that if we rip the very small financial heart out of arts funding, somehow our social problems will be eased and someone, somewhere, will get that vital hospital bed, wheelchair, or cancer treatment. Historically, the same arguments have also been applied in connection with science, astro-physics, and astronomy.
Four decades ago, many people questioned the value of space exploration while millions starved on planet earth. If we fail to support science and the arts, which are the visionary pillars supporting our small republic, we sell off the reflecting, creating core of our hard-won citizens’ society at the behest of an illogical economic pimp, and at the lowest possible price, with no room for manoeuvre, never mind creativity and progressive thinking. – Yours, etc,