There is an unseemly squabble - seemly squabbles are hardly worth bothering with - going on in the letters columns of these pages over the arts in Northern Ireland.
There actually are arts in Northern Ireland, though the political situation often obscures them, as it does everything else. Plays are put on there from time to time. The odd writer publishes a novel. Reports have come in of musical performances. Now and again one hears of a Northern Irish poet. Once in a while, a painter emerges. You would hardly say the arts are flourishing, but they are there.
However, most people in Northern Ireland, just as in this State, don't actually notice the arts. They hear about them from time to time, of course, but don't pay much heed. It's not that Irish people on either side of the Border are antagonistic to the arts, or that they are being rude. They aren't. Some people seem to be quite fond of them, and most may well believe that on balance, the arts are a good thing, or at least fairly harmless. The public does not normally get upset about the arts, even to the extent of accusing them of being a complete waste of time, which of course they are.
Artists too are traditionally treated kindly on this island, in the way village idiots used to be when we had villages. Hardly anyone begrudges them the few bob they make. People smile when they pass. No one minds them at all.
That is the way it should be. In this State, the Arts Council, the supreme regulatory body which occupies most of Merrion Square, is now, after some years of foolishly trying to attract the attention of the population at large, content to leave ordinary God-fearing people out of the equation. Instead it looks after the poor creatures who through no fault of their own are actually artists themselves, and for the rest of the time, concentrates on its own navel. This is what it is meant to do, and does very well. However, now and again the old childish "look-at-me" longings assert themselves in Merrion Square. (It may have something to do with the historical associations of the area as a centre of wealth and power.) When this happens, the public smiles indulgently, and waits for the Minister for Arts & Culture & So On to take action. The Minister obligingly wades in, the row is duly developed, opinions are voiced by the standing army of arts administrators (talking to each other through a single unified orifice), the whole thing is faithfully reported by Arts Reporters, Arts Correspondents, Arts Editors and Arts Commentators, and everybody goes away happy. Generally speaking, artists themselves keep well out of it. Their nerves would not usually be up to it all.
In a well-adjusted State, this is what being involved in the arts is all about. It is great fun and despite the odd minor public humiliation, few people ever get hurt.
Northern Ireland, however, just cannot get the thing right. For some years now, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has been on a crazed mission of near-religious intensity to involve everyone in the arts, whether they want to be involved or not (and the "or nots" clearly comprise most of the population, as already noted). The council simply cannot grasp the idea that the majority of the population, in the very nicest way, just doesn't want to be bothered.
For some reason known only to itself, the council has now decided to "target" minority communities. It may be that the council has finally given up on Catholics and Protestants, who make up about 99 per cent of the population up there, and now hopes to burrow into the people's consciousness from the outside, so to speak. So if I understand it correctly, the arts council is now tracking down and targeting innocent unsuspecting groups of Pakistani vegan Muslims, Vedic lesbian Buddhists, Sufi organic Muhammedans, Talmudic amputee Judaists and Oriental Ulster Scots-speaking Confucianists, and women, to all of whom it is bringing its unwanted message of inclusion. The council wants the arts organisations it funds to count the number of such people in the audience ("Please indicate in the boxes below the different ethnic and cultural communities and/or artists you have explicitly embraced in your work").
All of this would have passed entirely unnoticed, in the harmless way of most arts "initiatives", had not Peter Sirr, the director of the Irish Writers' Centre, taken the bait, and criticised the policy in the pages of this newspaper. Battle was subsequently joined between himself and Damian Smyth, the public affairs officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and the "debate" continues.
We may well stick our own oar in again next week, dragging in as many red herrings as are deemed appropriate for this slap-up feast of artistic controversy, studiously ignored as ever by sensible people on both sides of the Border.
