Una Mullally: Live events industry has been abandoned

The venues are silent. The festival dates have come and gone. Nothing is happening, and government support is curiously lacking. Multiple statements from government about the cultural sector have excluded music venues and festival settings.

It makes no sense that the number of people who can call around to your house for dinner is the same as the number of people allowed in the 3Arena, capacity 13,000.

The consequences of this neglect are serious.

There is of course the interruption to the trajectory of artists’ careers, for whom the live environment is essential to their livelihoods and their capacity to build and sustain careers. An amazing set at a festival, for example, can send an artist on a particular path that may not have been available to them before they stepped on stage. There’s lots of talk about milestones being missed this year, but less spoken about are the milestones artists were anticipating, or ones they couldn’t even predict.

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In many ways, every show or event is a risk. Most of this cannot be learned in a lecture theatre or at a desk. This is hands-on stuff

Shutting down the live events industry is going to have a seismic social and cultural impact that is impossible to quantify right now considering we’re stuck in the eye of an endless storm. From an audience perspective, there is also a hole in Irish culture right now, as many people have had their primary pastime of attending live events eradicated. But the biggest blow has been to the workers in an industry that is worth an incredible amount to the Irish economy, and of course to our creative and cultural health and wealth.

In many ways, every show or event is a risk. It’s a hugely competitive industry composed of a vast array of highly skilled professionals. The level of detail that goes into risk assessment, health and safety, security, the duty of care to attendees, the logistics of crowd control, transport, access and so on are huge. That’s before you even begin to take into account the scale and level of expertise required to stage a large-scale production. Most people outside the industry wouldn’t know where to start. Years of training goes into everything. Most of this cannot be learned in a lecture theatre or at a desk. This is hands-on stuff.

Pub discourse

Vintners and publicans have all but dominated the discourse regarding what social spaces should or shouldn’t be opening up. We have become well-versed in the terminology of the moment; all “wet pubs” and “substantial meals”. But all pubs can technically open, as long as they serve food (an arbitrary rule that is constantly getting caught in its own spokes). This may not be practical for certain pubs that don’t have the capacity to prepare food on their premises, or access to a nearby takeaway or restaurant to team up with to serve food.

But nothing is stopping a pub from buying in sandwiches, for example, to serve with drink orders. Smaller premises, of course, come up against a very obvious issue. The classic Irish pub, a cornerstone of our social heritage, is cosy by nature. So of course many pubs simply cannot open, as adhering to distancing regulations is next to impossible, and at any rate, economically unviable.

One of the aspects of the live events sector is how so much of it happens – often literally – backstage

Publicans also have a good deal of lobbying power, not least due to the solidarity extended to them by politicians who are publicans themselves. People are also familiar with how pubs “work”.

But one of the aspects of the live events sector is how so much of it happens – often literally – backstage. Punters don’t observe the weeks of building that go into preparing a festival site. They don’t listen to the negotiations with agents. They don’t hear the tour buses trundling into a car park at dawn. They aren’t at production meetings. They don’t see the detail of planning programming lighting and pyrotechnics. They aren’t hunched over a sound desk or clipped into a harness rigging a stage. The walkways and fences and barriers and bars and sets and toilets and campsites and stages and stalls and medical tents and art installations all have multiple people behind them.

No reduction

It is now essential that there is no reduction in the €350 rate of the pandemic unemployment payment for live events industry workers. It is essential that the Government creates a fund to sustain the industry – albeit it comatose – until events can happen again. Workers need to be supported because otherwise the expertise contained within the industry will evaporate. Losing that expertise will devastate the industry and create an insurmountable cost of bringing in workers from other jurisdictions to produce live events here.

Why is the Government making things so hard for the people who design, build and deliver some of the best nights of our lives?

This is an industry of troubleshooters, characters and entrepreneurs. Because of the nature of the gig, the people who work in the sector are full of resilience, stamina, creativity, invention, energy and drive. They can work around anything with a decent phone signal and a roll of gaffer tape.

They are tough guys and no-nonsense women, the blunt and the brilliant. They’re the kind of people who can overcome seemingly any obstacle, from the harshest weather to the most bizarre band request. They are people who literally make things happen. Why is the Government making things so hard for the people who design, build and deliver some of the best nights of our lives?