John Kennedy has to bring to fruition Cork's plans as European Capital of Culture for 2005, although the details are still a secret, writes Mary Leland
John Kennedy does not come across as a man with the weight of a city's expectations on his shoulders. But the people of Cork, who have been enduring chaos for the past year as the council digs up the streets to lay new drains, seem to feel that the city's designation as European Capital of Culture for 2005 is going to solve all its infrastructural ills. "You could classify me as a man of faith," he says. "I'm not responsible for any of that out there, but I'm told that it will be cleared up, and so far I believe what I'm told."
Perhaps the civic maelstrom he has to work in helps to explain why Kennedy uses the word "challenge" so often - "the constraints on us are money, space and time," he says at one point. "Being clever about how we mitigate these is part of the challenge . . . it's all challenge - it's an extraordinary challenge."
Indeed. He's one of the challenges himself, impregnable to anyone hoping to get a picture of how Cork is going to distinguish itself as European Capital of Culture. In one sense the impression is that it's all happening right here in River City: this is a man who likes quick decisions, and his office could be the only place in Cork that's actually recruiting at the moment. But in another way there's the impression of a void yet to be filled by proposals for his programme of events.
That void is not of his making: it's Cork's approach to cultural life, shown most shamefully at the moment by the debacle over the new school of music, on whose arrival much of the strength of Cork's claim for the European designation was based but that is now delayed almost to infinity. Or there's the city's museum at FitzGerald's Park, which has awaited its fit-out, and thus the use of its expensive annex, for two years. And there's even the hiatus of his own, second-choice appointment - a hiccup he banishes, quite nicely, from our conversation.
In Cork, cultural leadership is what's lacking more than anything, Kennedy believes. For now, for a city instinctively sceptical, it's got to come from him.
He feels he's up for it, though. There's a gusto in his approach, fuelled not only by his sense of kinship with the 10 or so people who make up his executive team but also by the quality and range of responses to the invitation for project ideas, which are still flooding in to his headquarters, in the restored 18th century Civic Trust House, on Pope's Quay.
Kennedy won't be announcing three-quarters of his programme until early winter, despite local criticisms of delay, but he says he feels ahead of schedule, with confirmation talks under way, venues being booked and several contracts on the point of being signed.
Big projects are rumoured: a complete series of Mahler symphonies, for example. And Martin Barrett, who is working on the opening and closing ceremonies for the Athens Olympics next year, has been signed up as special-projects director.
Cork 2005 has been deliberately keeping a low profile, however. As Kennedy puts it: "If you tell the story too soon it will be forgotten when attention is really needed."
At the moment he's wrestling with issues of corporate support in an environment in which business sponsorship of the arts - or even of cultural events in general - is shifting in tone and availability. "There are three major drinks companies here yet 50 per cent of our programme could be unsuitable for sponsorship by that industry," he says, pointing out one problem.
He is also trying to assess the look and feel of everything that's going on in a territory that, as a Dubliner, is not his own.
But Kennedy appreciates the fact that people have been thinking big in a small city. Now living on Patrick's Hill with his wife, Una Kelly, and their two children, he has liked Cork for years. As tour manager for U2 he found that the core of the U2 grouping was from the city, and remembering his schooldays at Rockwell College, in Co Tipperary, he recalls the bonding process of being hammered around the rugby pitch by Cork teams from Presentation Brothers College and Christian Brothers College.
He wanted to head Cork 2005 because he found the elements of the band-tour business that interested him most were non-musical. "I really wanted to broaden out in my own career, where I found the convergence of technology with creativity the most interesting part of the gig. These are the techno terms: convergence and delivery, how anything is reached. My training is in integrating things and in delivering them."
In getting this job he had to take the place as it is. "We still don't know what opportunities for 2005 will be sustained afterwards. We've just got to see what happens. Part of the challenge, and part of our project evaluation strategy, is to keep the energy and meaning alive over 365 days of events and beyond that again. It's no small thing."
In any case, Kennedy sees commitment compensating for a lack of professionalism in some areas. "Commitment to the culture, the place, the city, the discipline: those are the criteria by which I judge professionalism, or at least by which I answer the question. Yes, there's probably also a level of amateurism, but not to such an extent that Cork 2005 will be disabled by it.
"You have to look at what the community owns: there may be a cycle of life from which some things are going to drop, but should they be propped up just because they used to be here? I don't have the answer to that, but I can say that I haven't been disappointed by the vast majority of the people anxious to make a contribution to the year's programmes.
"We're an enabling organisation, we don't have much money to spend, and the bedrock of this event is going to be the latent inspiration and creativity which will be coaxed into being through contact with us and our resources."
But if cultural leadership is lacking, so is money. With €13.5 million raised so far, including the Government's contribution, Kennedy is searching for at least another €7 million. Cork 2005 is setting up meetings with businesses, EU sources and the Arts Council.
He believes Cork 2005 is as much a national as a local event and is also exploring its European significance, inviting the ambassadors of the new entrants to the EU to a meeting arranged by Pat Cox, the Munster MEP who last year became president of the European Parliament.
"One of the big worries for these new arrivals is how to make their own cultural voices heard in the wider European structure. I'm looking seriously at a proposal which could give them an international platform in our programme.
"I'm no evangelist, but questions like this are of personal interest to me, and maybe the intellectual, probing, provocative strands of debate within Cork 2005 will both ask and answer them."
No evangelist, yet Kennedy will be the first director of a European capital of culture to leave a written account of his stewardship, as his four-year contract entails a substantial report to the EU on "what we did and how we did it".
Branding will come into that, and he studies a Cork 2005 postcard announcing its new location on Pope's Quay, with an image of a fizzing Halloween sparkler.
"I don't know what it means, but it's based on Picasso's treatment of a phosphorescent tube," he says. "I think it's the spark of creativity, expanding into a map of where we're going."
Where Kennedy's going is a complex world in which Picasso has to cohabit with the pigeon-fanciers of Cork. He agrees that culture is what makes life worth living and that minority sports such as pigeon racing fulfil many people.
Not only that - here's the integration and delivery again - pigeons equal post, equals e-mail, equals communication. "If that isn't a cultural activity I'm wasting my time."
But culture, Kennedy remembers, is also what you grow people in. Cork people will grow through the new definitions this special year will give to the meaning of the word "culture".
The city's geography is changing suddenly and aggressively, and Kennedy acknowledges as inevitable the perceived link between what emanates from the headquarters of Cork 2005 and what happens at the speculative new quayside neighbourhood of Docklands.
"It's not part of the deal, but if we effect some kind of mind shift in how the people of Cork see their city, I think the manifestation of that change will be in Docklands."
No small thing, as Kennedy says: changing not just a city but a city's image of itself, and not before time.
