Maureen Kennelly: taking over the Arts Council in the midst of a crisis

It’s a quiet evening in the gracious Arts Council HQ on Merrion Square, uncharacteristically quiet because many staff are still working remotely due to Covid-19.

The director’s office is relatively new for Maureen Kennelly, because although she’s been leading the Arts Council, the government agency for the arts, for months, her appointment was announced on March 6th, just days before the shutdown.

She worked remotely for months, in circumstances unimaginable when she applied for the job in January. The energetic, clear-sighted, empathetic and unshowy Kennelly seems widely respected and liked, with a reputation as a good people manager. She’s also inspiring and unrelentingly positive (she self-deprecatingly refers to not wanting to sound Pollyannaish) about the challenges for the arts in the crisis.

A while into our interview, Kennelly talks about how some Irish towns and villages have “a certain kind of swagger – swagger in a nice way – a sense of self about themselves, and you can tell, often, it’s because they have a really good arts festival, or a brilliant theatre company.

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“Or they have a gallery of which they’re extremely proud. You can identify those. Sport does the same thing for counties. I think for somebody growing up, to have that really successful arts organisation to cling to is a really empowering thing.”

As examples of that swagger she mentions visiting Killorglin during K-Fest, “teeming with visual arts graduates connected to the area and exhibitions. And you could just tell the whole town was fully signed up, embracing it.”

The sense of pride in Clifden Arts Festival is "very palpable”. She’s worked in Kilkenny, “very obviously a city that has nurtured the arts especially well”, and Galway, where she was aware of the sense of place and pride.

Arts Council (AC) investment in festivals is “so important – it can be the high point in that town or village’s calendar, time for people to come together, celebrate their local environment – more important now than ever. That’s a very, very valuable thing.”

Place and access seem essential to her holistic view of arts. “I suppose if I had a mantra it’s excellence with access. I’ve been very lucky through my life and my career that I’ve been able to engage with the highest quality of arts. I grew up in Ballylongford, which is eight miles from Listowel, and Writers’ Week was in my immediate consciousness from a very early age.”

She did workshops, entered competitions (she won a Listowel poetry competition aged 14, I extract from her, very unwillingly). Poet Brendan Kennelly (no relation) was from the village, “a beacon for us growing up”. Another seminal teen event was when her mother brought her to Druid, visiting the Plaza in Listowel with Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming.

“When you start with very high, exacting standards like that, it’s a pretty good trigger for the life that’s ahead of you.”

Working in arts for decades, it was always “to build a strong bridge between the public and the arts. That’s the pitch I went in on [as director), to make the arts as relevant as they can be, to normalise the arts in all areas of society.”

The sector has been among the worst hit by the pandemic, but bridging the connections between the public and the arts is still what she hopes to achieve. She is awed by the resilience of those in the sector and wants to “ensure it survives and is relevant and meets its public. And has the resources necessary to perform at the highest level.”

With Covid-19, the creative sector, particularly live entertainment, is in survival mode. After initial sluggish support, the Government has come good on some recommendations of the AC’s high-level advisory group formed early in the pandemic.

Culture has an additional €56m (including €31m in the July stimulus); the council has €25 extra, bringing its 2020 funding to €105 – 40 per cent higher than in 2019. The advisory group also recommended a €30m sustainability fund for 2021.

There is no doubt fallout from Covid-19 will result in more of these artists coming to the Arts Council as their income continues to be wiped out

Five months into the crisis, Kennelly says “there’s now a greater degree of understanding of the needs of the sector”, more awareness of the value of arts and entertainment, and also of how they have been particularly badly hit. That appreciation has been “seeping into mainstream”, with a “greater empathy coming from all corners of society. People are able to think inside each other’s skin far more, and we have a common concern.”

During the shutdown, people at home were looking for “distraction and engagement and inspiration and enjoyment, and suddenly twigging that book published by that Irish publisher is a pretty valuable thing. If I didn’t have that, things would be less interesting.”

She also credits the National Campaign for the Arts grassroots organisation for this.

“They’re running a great campaign, connecting people with what’s on their doorstep and saying, we can’t lose this. It’s reminding people this is the a real living breathing thing which we all need to work to save.”

The council has “some terrific experts, with on-the-ground experience working collaboratively with the sector, which has brilliant expertise. I firmly believe the sector is populated by really talented, committed, passionate managers. It’s rare to hear of massive overruns in the arts.

“I think often people don’t even know it themselves that they’re very good managers, producing really impressive work on very lean budgets.”

Production and crew too, across art forms, “give it their all and they have really high standards”. She loves “how they interact with the public. Their resourcefulness and imagination will be useful in coming up with new ways of presenting works for the public.”

They are often freelance, as are many artists. Freelancers have “had the greatest impact visited upon them”.

“There is no doubt fallout from Covid-19 will result in more of these artists coming to the Arts Council as their income continues to be wiped out. Which of course is another compelling reason for the need for increased investment in future.”

She mentions musicians particularly, many of whom were halted just before St Patrick’s Day, often a major part of their annual income.

She recalls productions when you’d have a team of actors and production crew “on payroll for eight or nine weeks for a theatre show, and then the heartache thinking of them signing on the following Monday morning”.

“It’s always struck me how resilient people have to be,” she says. “Particularly actors, who are laying themselves bare so much, going for auditions. You could name any number of really well-known actors who in normal times are out of work for long swathes of the year.

“I just don’t know how people sustain themselves. It’s really, really hard. Obviously there’s a great sense of satisfaction and a vocational aspect, but we shouldn’t expect people to rely on that.

“It’s not fully understood how low the financial rewards are for artists generally. There’s a perception that because people are well known, they must be doing well.”

How do you improve this? “Encouraging organisations to be even more artist-focused.” She mentions the possibility of our “necklace of fantastic venues and arts centres” engaging more artists directly, similarly to how year-round artists’ contracts are common in continental Europe.

The precarity also feeds into the future: “How can we encourage people to think the arts are a viable career?”. Europe come up again: “Until we properly address the provision of arts in education, we are always going to struggle with public engagement”.

She mentions a recent dance sector (video) meeting where choreographer Michael Keegan Dolan spoke passionately about “wanting to wake up in an Ireland that never again says ‘I don’t understand dance’.”

“If you don’t grow up in a society where an aspiration to play the flute or be a contemporary dancer is a real, viable option, you’re always on the back foot. Countries like Austria or Germany, where people are beating down the doors to attend dance, opera, theatre, have really high level of appreciation of the arts. That’s where I would love us to be.”

A year in New York in 1990, working in telesales and as a waitress, she sucked up culture

Education challenges are “a big nut to crack”, and moreso with a pandemic. The AC’s Creative Schools offers opportunities, but it’s still a pilot not all schools can access. Here it is “a privilege to have music training”.

Kennelly is firm that open and equal access to arts provision from an early age is an equality issue, which is why she sees the council’s recent policies on equality, human rights and diversity, and on Pay the Artists, as both crucial.

Organisations heavily reliant on box-office income are also under particular pressure. She mentions Cork’s Everyman, where just eight per cent of income is from public sources. Last week the Gate Theatre, acknowledging it couldn’t reopen before 2021, said 67 per cent of its income is from box office, so it cannot function with social distancing.

With public funding, there are always disappointed applicants, one of whom recently circulated an AC rejection letter, and who was dismayed at the scoring system in his assessment, and “humiliating degrading judgments”.

Kennelly talks about the AC’s system of peer panels and expert advice, and not being able to fund everyone. “Nobody likes forms or reports but there are certain requirements of people and organisations” to meet governance.

She is aware judgments “can seem very brutal at times. And it’s hard to be putting long hours into applications that don’t succeed. I think an awful lot of misdirected energy goes into applications”.

The team hosts clinics on improving applications. “I don’t want the sector seeing us as a baddie, trying to penalise them. We have a really good staff and I want to ensure that’s recognised by the sector too.”

Kennelly would like the Arts Council to be seen “more like your kindly big sister who’s there to enable and encourage you, rather than the school inspector finger-wagging funding agency”.

Years ago at UCD Kennelly was diverted from a social work career when “I fell in with a crowd ...” She laughs. The bad lot were studying communications in Rathmines, among them (later) playwrights Enda Walsh and Eugene O’Brien. “Through that company I became extremely interested in the arts. That was a big gateway for me.”

A year in New York in 1990, working in telesales and as a waitress, she sucked up culture – “Carmen standing at the Met for $5, Allen Ginsberg in the 92nd Street Y, Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the Lower East Side , David Byrne in Central Park, the amazing singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara in Brooklyn. Keith Haring murals all over the place. It was just so rich, the perfect New York experience.”

Back home she volunteered at Dublin’s James Joyce Centre, meeting the late Ken Monaghan, James Joyce’s nephew, “my first mentor”. She studied arts administration in NUIG in the mid-1990s, plugging into “Galway’s brilliant scene” and worked under the “great stewardship” of Druid general manager Jane Daly, “a high bar” early on.

Her career blazed along, from general manager with Pigsback theatre company (later Fishamble), to artistic director of Kilkenny Arts Festival and later the Mermaid arts centre in Bray, freelancing along the way (including at the Arts Council, looking after festivals then theatre/dance companies).

In 2008 she did a master’s degree in literature and publishing (“satisfying my itch to study English literature”) at NUIG, double-jobbing at Cúirt literature festival, where “the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud descended. At the time it was absolutely gargantuan, but it’s eclipsed by our current challenges for sure.” From 2013 she headed up Poetry Ireland – “hard to leave” for the Arts Council, after bringing it to the threshold of a new Poetry Ireland Centre.

In all that zig-zagging across the country she says she is “very lucky to have a very supportive husband [Fergus Cronin], who is also a constant excellent sounding board”.

She recalls meeting AC chair Kevin Rafter the day of her appointment, discussing “how the Arts Council could be the IDA for the arts” with a stronger developmental role. That’s been long talked about but she thinks there is “a real opportunity to show leadership because of the crisis. Everything will need to change so much, and we need to help people navigate that.”