Design & Crafts Council Ireland is threatening legal action against a member who is one of the country’s most prominent craftspeople. In a situation that might be akin to the Arts Council threatening to sue one of Ireland’s best-known writers or musicians, it has said it will sue the glass artist Róisín de Buitléar over a critical report that she sent it.
In February 2024 the council selected de Buitléar and 22 of Ireland’s other leading craftmakers, many of them also members of the organisation, to exhibit at Collect, one of the world’s most prestigious and influential showcases for high-end design.
It is a significant international opportunity: as well as being on show to a large audience, the works are for sale; prices ranged from £500 to £50,000 at Collect 2024, according to the organisers of the event, at Somerset House in London.
Afterwards, 21 of the 23 Irish exhibitors wrote a feedback report that was emailed to the chairman of Design & Crafts Council Ireland, Peter Hynes, to its chief executive at the time, Rosemary Steen, to its head of design, Tom Watts, and to the council’s board.
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The report, which The Irish Times has seen, is strongly critical in places but appears to be constructive in its overall tone. Citing “a series of errors”, it details a combination of what its authors claimed were specific and general failures in communication, organisation, exhibition design, publicity, staffing and signage.
Part of the craftspeople’s concern is that, as each of them funds the cost of making the work they exhibit at Collect and of travelling to the event, such failures can mean they lose a lot of money. But they say they are mainly troubled by the possible reputational damage to themselves and to their sector.
Two months later, in May 2024, de Buitléar received a letter from Beauchamps, a corporate law firm, threatening legal action on behalf of the council. The letter, which The Irish Times has also seen, claims that she defamed the council by seeking “to question our client’s management of the Collect24 exhibition and impugn its reputation and ability to host international events of this calibre”.
Although 21 craftspeople wrote and put their names to the report, Beauchamps appears to have threatened to sue de Buitléar as she was the person who emailed it to the council. The letter implies that the firm would also take action against any other people whom de Buitléar identified as authors of the report.
Such legal threats are unusual in a creative sector where, as in others, robust questioning is normal. One of de Buitléar’s colleagues says the letter in effect silences them all.
Joe Hogan, who did not take part in Collect 2024 but has a significant international reputation, and was presented with the council’s lifetime-achievement award by President Michael D Higgins in 2021, says that he tried to raise the matter at the council’s agm last May but that Hynes told him it could not be discussed.
“He cited, to my best recollection, legal concerns,” Hogan says. “Since the agm I have tried to have this legal threat withdrawn, because I think it creates such a chilling prospect for debate within the organisation.”
Hogan says the threat was even more astonishing given that the report is “so obviously an effort to engage, to make future Collect participation better and more equitable”.
De Buitléar declines to comment, given the apparently open-ended threat of legal action against her, but a former council staff member and one of the other Irish makers from Collect 2024 both corroborate the issues the report raised and underline the extreme stress the situation has caused.
“Some of the makers were really affected,” the craftsperson says, speaking anonymously to talk about issues underlying the legal action. “We haven’t received solicitor’s letters, but we are still waiting for it, because we all authored the letter. If we were brought to the High Court, how would we even finance a case?”
They describe “how devastated and disappointed we are with this national institution that they would attempt to put a legal charge on us for giving constructive feedback. Their annual report is full of our work ... They are supposed to represent us, not sue us.”
The craftsperson says they have tried three times to meet Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke, whose department funds Design & Crafts Council Ireland, but “to no avail”.
They cite a “brain drain” at the council as a contributing factor to the issues they would like to see resolved. The former employee agrees. Since 2020 there have been more than 30 staff departures, the former staff member says. Some will have been routine retirements or departures for new opportunities, but the overall figure seems unusually high for an organisation with a core staff of about 20 people.
“I am disheartened by the present direction of DCCI,” Hogan says, citing alongside the legal threat the apparent suspension of the council’s prestigious Portfolio Critical Selection programme and the lack of a curator at the National Design & Craft Gallery, Kilkenny. (Its website lists just one person, a gallery co-ordinator, in its Our Team area.)
What sort of organisation could be proud of the fact that ordinary members would feel the atmosphere at an agm was too intimidating to speak their piece?
In June 2024 Hogan wrote to Steen in the hope of persuading the council “to resolve this matter amicably and without recourse to law”. In a letter to the council’s board that month, he also noted his sorrow at the state of an organisation that he said he had loved for almost all of his working life.
“The saddest comment was that some people mentioned that it was ‘brave of me’ to raise the matter. What sort of organisation could be proud of the fact that ordinary members would feel the atmosphere at an agm was too intimidating to speak their piece?” he wrote. “A culture of fear, even if that perception is inaccurate, shames us.”
Steen left Design & Crafts Council Ireland to become director of the Residential Tenancies Board, in August 2024. Mary Blanchfield, the council’s interim chief executive, says that “DCCI has no desire to become embroiled in legal action, but has a duty to protect the professional reputations of our staff and contractors and the interests of the broader organisation and has done so on this occasion. DCCI is keen to move beyond the current impasse and offered to meet a key maker in an attempt to do so. This offer, which remains outstanding, has not so far been taken up.”
The “key maker” is not one of the group who wrote the feedback report, who say the council has declined their request to meet. Hogan says that in September 2024 the council invited him to meet its chairman but that, as it also reiterated the need for it to “act on foot of its legal advice”, he regarded this as an impasse so did not take up the offer.
Collect 2025 opens in London on February 28th and runs until March 2nd. Design & Crafts Council Ireland says it will be showcasing “fresh talent”, with 14 emerging artists and makers drawn from its Future Makers awards and its Homo Faber fellowship.
