Snuffing out our creative industry is not 'smart' economising

CULTURE SHOCK:ART, LIKE NATURE, is an ecosystem. If you take one part out of it, it affects all the others – sometimes in disproportionate ways. Diversity is not mere profusion – it is the expression of the range of possibilities. If that range is diminished, everything within it is impoverished. At the moment, the biodiversity of Irish theatre is under severe threat.

All the rhetoric about the arts in Ireland includes the idea that artistic expression is not a choice but a necessity. But we don’t really believe this. As soon as money gets tight, the arts become an optional extra, a luxury we can no longer afford. An effective €9 million cut in the budget for the Arts Council is the expression of this eternal truth.

Let’s be clear about this. Cutting the arts budget by €9 million has nothing to do with fiscal rectitude. In the context of the public finances, it is not really worth talking about the millions anymore. Everything is billions. So the cuts being made in the arts – which will probably save €4 or €5 million when the tax and welfare implications are factored in – are not part of a grand strategy to balance the books. They are the equivalent of pulling the wings off flies – a form of petty sadism.

Within the fragile ecosystem of Irish theatre, those who suffer most from this kind of action are those in the middle. The larger companies will take significant pain, but they can adapt and survive. The small, project-based operations never had any financial security or infrastructure in the first place, and will probably carry on for the love of it. The real damage is to the whole middle layer – the companies who are big enough to have acquired some kind of seemingly permanent existence but who are too small to survive the scale of the cuts they are receiving. Companies such as Barabbas, Bedrock and Meridian, whose core funding has been decimated, will almost certainly be wiped out.

Barabbas is a particularly egregious example. This is not some kind of fly-by-night operation that can be snuffed out without a thought. It has been around for 17 years, since 1993. (Ironically, the Arts Council was able to fund it – albeit modestly – before the largesse of the boom years was available.) It has mounted more than 20 shows, in Ireland and in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Denmark and New Zealand.

More importantly, Barabbas is unique. It has a consistent and coherent grounding in a particular form of theatre – clowning, especially in the tradition of Jacques Lecoq. The company has both developed for itself and passed on to generations of students a rigorous approach to physical, largely non-verbal theatre. There’s a whole current of contemporary performance that passes through Barabbas and that will simply be switched off with its demise.

The modest investment of public funds in the company is precisely that – an investment. It has allowed a small but influential group of performers to get better at what they do, to hone skills and apply them. Those designers, actors and musicians who have worked with the company have undoubtedly been enriched by the experience. Both directly and indirectly, Barabbas has added greatly to the rather narrow base of skills in the Irish theatre. To take just one example, Druid's brilliant production of Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce, one of the most successful Irish plays internationally in recent years, is directed by the old Barabbas lag Mikel Murfi, whose clown training is obvious in its physical precision and invention.

It makes no sense, even in economic terms, to dump an investment when it is paying dividends. Barabbas has been in fine form of late. It has two highly successful shows in its current repertoire: Circus, which was one of the hits of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, last year and Johnny Patterson, The Singing Irish Clown, which has been almost universally lauded and was due to tour nationwide this year.

It also has two new shows in development and plans to revive its much-loved version of Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy.

Barabbas has now lost its core funding. It has been offered money to continue the tour of Johnny Pattersonand its artistic director Raymond Keane has been advised that he can apply as an individual for funding for one-off projects. But Keane doesn't work as an individual – his whole style is collaborative. And the essential value of the company lies in the continuity that has allowed it to continually develop and enhance its skills.

Killing off a company such as Barabbas – and cutting others like Corn Exchange so badly that they will struggle to survive – makes no economic sense. Even in the narrowest terms, the Indecon report last year reckoned that the €76 million spent by the Arts Council in 2008 translated into €240 million of economic activity. But the so-called “creative industries” in Ireland generate €5.5 billion in economic activity and 95,000 jobs. These benefits don’t come from nowhere. They depend on a creative ecosystem just as much as other industries depend on a physical one.

All the rhetoric about the smart economy and restoring Ireland’s international reputation is hollow if we’re squeezing the life out of the very fragile biodiversity of artistic skills and traditions. There’s nothing very smart about an economy that doesn’t understand the fundamental role of the arts as the incubator and testing ground for creativity and innovation.

And the only untarnished reputation this country has for anything at the moment is as a place that produces high-quality art. I’m not being facetious when I suggest that one decent theatre company probably generates more interest in, and admiration for, this benighted isle than a Cabinet-full of ministers waving at St Patrick’s Day parades around the globe. If we still don’t get that, we may as well close Barabbas down because we have more than enough clowns.