If you want a long career in government, don’t become minister for culture

If you want to have a long and varied career in government, don’t take the job of minister for culture. That’s the main lesson to be gleaned from the history of the position over the 31 years since Michael D Higgins became the first full member of cabinet to hold the brief, in 1993.

Amid the general mutterings of dissatisfaction from anonymous Government colleagues over Catherine Martin’s performance during the latest instalment of the RTÉ tragicomedy, there has been an undercurrent, not unheard of when it comes to senior female politicians, that she is lightweight or out of her depth. She might be all right at fluffy stuff such as opening art galleries or launching bursaries, it is implied. But a full-blown political crisis is beyond her.

Whether true or not, these opinions are revealing of how the political class ranks the arts position in the pecking order of government.

More often than not, culture has marked the end of a ministerial career. It was a first and last spin on the cabinet merry-go-round for Higgins, Síle de Valera, Jimmy Deenihan and Martin’s predecessor, Josepha Madigan (who was demoted to junior minister after the last election). It was effectively a pre-retirement stepdown facility for John O’Donoghue, Séamus Brennan and Martin Cullen. Only the underestimated Heather Humphreys has gone on to build a successful long-term post-arts ministerial career.

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It’s also worth noting is that, over the course of those 31 years, the ministerial role has hardly ever included responsibility for media. Higgins’s brief did cover broadcasting (where his achievements included the establishment of what is now TG4 and the removal of the Section 31 broadcasting ban), but media was subsequently returned to the Department of Communications, where it stayed until 2020.

Is media not part of culture? Most people would think so, but for successive Irish governments between 1997 and 2020 the answer was no. That is unusual by international standards, which almost universally recognise media as a cultural product. This Irish exceptionalism reflects a narrow conservatism, lack of imagination and thinly veiled philistinism that runs like a seam throughout Irish political history, with few exceptions. In that mindset, broadcasting (in the old, predigital parlance) was more about transmitters and cables than it was about programmes. And it was more about control than creativity.

[ There has never been a sense that Catherine Martin was really on top of things ]

That mentality has been deeply damaging. Higgins was intent on promoting the idea of an interlinked audiovisual sector, with skills, facilities and creativity spanning the film and television industries in both public-service and independent productions. Siloing film and television into separate government departments, with the old Irish Film Board (now Screen Ireland) reporting to the department of arts and with broadcasting subject to the department of communications, certainly didn’t help that vision, and is probably partly to blame for RTÉ's long-term failure to play the central role in building a national film industry that other European public-service broadcasters have always seen as part of their remit. Meanwhile, it would be interesting to hear Martin’s critics defend the masterly inactivity of successive ministers for communications, whose failures to address the public-media crisis over more than a decade led directly to the current mess.

Over the years the job description for arts minister has mutated from one government to the next, sometimes taking in sport and tourism, often including the Gaeltacht and occasionally even encompassing regional affairs. As Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin has a wider brief than any of her predecessors.

Regardless of how matters develop over the rest of the Government’s term, and how the current Minister’s performance is ultimately judged, it would be myopic in the extreme to draw the lesson from the current crisis that media should be moved to another department. In the three decades since Higgins took the job, our understanding of what the word actually means has been blown up, along with most of our assumptions about its present and its future.

The consequences have been profound in all aspects of our lives, including in the political sphere. Old assumptions about gatekeeping and control have been rendered irrelevant. Fraught questions about free speech, misinformation and privacy have been raised and remain unresolved. What role, if any, does public-service media now play in maintaining a distinctively Irish cultural space in a sea of globally distributed content? What is the future of big-tech regulation? Where will developments in AI take us in the next few years? Will legacy media survive? Should it survive?

In a saner world, these and similar questions would be high on the agenda of any self-respecting government, and the minister responsible would carry significant weight at cabinet. It’s about time that happened.