The State cannot afford to repeat the mistakes made over the last 20 years in regional planning and development, Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Development Simon Coveney has said. Mr Coveney was speaking at a conference in Dublin Castle held under the auspices of his department and the Arts Council to discuss how best to support and develop the arts across Ireland.
Mr Coveney will be launching a draft version of his proposed new national planning framework shortly, with a view towards publishing a final version in September. “Are we going to allow the next 20 years to look like the last 20?” he asked. “When the extra million people who joined our population lived in houses that were built by accident on the outskirts of our cities, while many of our core city centres have significant dereliction and vacant properties. Or are we going to plan in a very different way?”
Mr Coveney said it was extraordinary that, of the 20 towns the 2002 National Spatial Strategy had targeted to be the fastest-growing in the country, not one had figured the actual top 20.
“That cannot be allowed to happen in future,” he said. “Along with planning how we live, we have to create strong and vibrant communities. That means good-quality housing and public transport. It also means catering for people’s minds as well as their physical needs.”
The conference heard from economists, statisticians, sociologists and arts practitioners, who addressed a range of issues likely to arise in the context of the commitment to culture expressed in the Government’s new Creative Ireland strategy.
Experimental work
These included the contentious question of how to measure the benefits of State support for culture, heritage and the arts. Prof John O’Hagan of TCD argued that experimental work should be supported, even if it did not attract an audience, as it fulfilled the same function for the creative industries as research and development in universities did for other sectors.
Prof Geoffrey Crossick of the University of London, who directed the cultural value project carried out by the Arts and Humanities Board in the UK, said the cultural sector’s value in Britain had became entwined with other agendas, and it had felt obliged to make its case for public funding “in terms different from that of the cultural experience itself”.
Under New Labour from 1997 other benefits along with economic ones had become the driver of cultural policy, he said, including the contribution of the arts to urban regeneration, social inclusion, community cohesion and health, which had prompted artist Grayson Perry’s sardonic ceramic work This Pot Will Reduce Crime by 29 Per Cent.
Prof Crossick criticised what he described as the over-attentiveness of culture policymakers to areas that received taxpayer subsidies, while they largely neglected the amateur and participatory arts, almost entirely ignored the value of commercially provided culture and barely grasped the transformation which had taken place in where people experience arts and culture, which increasingly was at home, travelling and online.
“If we’re to understand the difference that arts and culture make we must explore the full range of these experiences,” he said.
