Old ideas won't work on new Arts Council

In a competition for the most boring opening sentence for an opinion column, the following might stand a good chance of victory: " Last week, the government appointed a new Arts Council." The politics of Irish cultural institutions often bring to mind the Private Eye parody of an interminable seannos ballad: "Oh come all you true born Irishmen and listen to my song/ For it is extremely boring and it is extremely long."

It is nevertheless true that the Government did appoint a new Arts Council last week. And, dull as it may be, this ought to matter. This is a time of strange contradictions for the arts in Ireland. On the one hand, there has seldom if ever been a broader consensus around the idea that the arts matter; £81 million public money has been spent on the present arts plan, a government department is now devoted to the issue. There is a pervasive inclination to celebrate and if possible exploit Ireland's international reputation as a cultural powerhouse. Art has taken over from the Irish language and the beauties of the landscape as a national shibboleth.

On the other hand, though, this has happened at a time when all certainty about the meaning of Irish culture and any vestige of a consensus about the common values which underlie it, have disappeared. The arts have arrived on the national agenda at precisely the moment when the idea of a national cultural project has evaporated.

For most of this century, the idea of Irish culture was bound up with a specific idea of Irish politics. Cultural distinctiveness was seen as the basis for political independence. Artists, at least in theory, were to be the purveyors of an uplifting vision of Irishness. As Michael Collins put it, they would be "more than the mere producers of verse and the painters of pictures. They will teach us, by their vision, the noble race that we may become, expressed in their poetry and their pictures. They will inspire us to live as Irish men and women should".

This formula at once elevates and denigrates the artist. The artist is seen as a moral and political teacher; but failure to provide moral and political uplift means being a mere producer of verse or painter of pictures whose work, implicitly, can safely be censored, jeered and ignored. And, of course, Collins, like pretty well everyone else in Irish nationalism, ignored the awkward fact that we weren't one noble race but a deeply divided people. Culture, that great abstraction, was in reality a dangerous and unstable fault-line.

Culture is all the habits, attitudes and values we take for granted. Except that, in divided places, like Ireland, what one side takes for granted is what the other takes as a threat.

In normal societies, culture is how you see yourself. In divided societies, it is also how others see you. In peaceful places, it's a matter of choice. In polarised places, the choice is between equally absurd stereotypes. Protestant culture is dour men in bowler hats marching in the parades of the Orange Order. It is the Bible, the Queen, and supporting Glasgow Rangers Football club. It is small families and neat houses, shrewd shopkeepers and the engineers who built the Titanic. Catholic culture is hurling and Gaelic football, classes in the Irish language, and large families. It is nuns, publicans, the Pope and Glasgow Celtic Football Club. Protestants play rugby; Catholics say the Rosary. Protestants have flute bands; Catholics dance jigs. Most people find these stereotypes risible as descriptions of who they are themselves but useful as descriptions of who they are not. John Taylor, deputy leader of the largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, and an important figure in the peace talks, defined his political identity at a conference on Protestant culture: "I'm an Ulsterman, not an Irishman. I don't jig at crossroads or play Gaelic football or speak Irish."

Most Irish Catholics don't do any of these things either, but that's not the point. Protestant culture is, as much as anything, the assumption that Catholics are people who converse in Irish while jigging at crossroads. Catholic culture is the assumption that Protestants are people who quote the Old Testament at each other while trying on the latest style of bowler hat.

Yet we now have an unprecedented chance to get away from this deadly nonsense once and for all. Slowly, the stereotypes have been overtaken by a more potent cultural force. Television and shopping have seeped into everybody's soul.

These days, if you look closely at an IRA commemoration of the martyrs who died to get the British out and to create a Gaelic Ireland, you notice that many of the kids in the crowd are wearing the shirts of English football teams like Manchester United and Liverpool. If you watch an Orange flute band on parade, you will see that some of the kids can't wait to get out of their shiny black shoes and into their cool Nike trainers. And if you're a Belfast Protestant and you go to see the movie, Titanic, you can't help noticing that as this symbol of your people's skills cuts through the Atlantic waves, the soundtrack is mostly Irish jigs.

In theory, the two Arts Councils on the island are supposed to be playing a key part in opening up Irish culture. In 1974, when the idea of having all-Ireland cross-border bodies was being discussed, a senior official of the Northern Ireland civil service pointed out that culture could never be one of the areas of mutual interest between the Protestant north and the Catholic south: "For a government to hand over its functions in respect to arts and culture to some international authority would be to abdicate its basic responsibility."

Now, culture is likely, under the Belfast Agreement, to be a matter for just such an all-Irish body. That idea, moreover, has been remarkably uncontroversial.

It was reasonable to expect, therefore, that in appointing a new Arts Council, Bertie Ahern and Sile de Valera would have kept these new realities at the front of their minds. There's not much sign that they did so. There are some extremely distinguished people on the new Council, but the last thing anyone could call the appointments as a whole is radical. There is just one member from Northern Ireland. And probably the most conservative cultural body in the country, Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann, has been given a place at the top table.

Its representative, Una O Murchu, was quoted in The Irish Times on Saturday using words - "authentic", "native" and "pure" - that usually have people reaching for their Celtic and Rangers scarves. And Comhaltas, be warned, is on record demanding that the State place "our native artforms centre stage in. . .policy-making and funding. Not to do so will earn us the scorn of an observant art world internationally who are (sic) more and more attesting to the unique and priceless heritage which we possess". With a bit of luck and deft leadership from its new chairman, Brian Farrell, the Arts Council may still be able to start out from a realisation that "we", "our", "native" and "authentic" are notions that have to be interrogated, not thrown around as if we all agreed about what they mean. Maybe it will be able to remind the Government that, after Good Friday, Irish culture is a set of questions that demand bold and radical answers.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York