The clock is ticking: there's one day left before the deadline for submissions to the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands in response to the Minister, Sile de Valera's discussion document proposing a review of arts legislation, Towards a New Framework for the Arts. Members of the public, arts practitioners and organisations - i.e. anyone who cares about the future of the arts in this country - are invited to make their views known to the Minister (by letter, fax, or, for last-minute flurries, by e-mail), and these will be taken into account in the drafting of a new arts act.
This is a very welcome opportunity for everyone in the arts sector to make their views known, both on the workings of the Arts Council as currently constituted - as funding body, development agency and policy formulator - and on the changes proposed in the discussion document. At arts events around the country in recent months, discussions about the Arts Council's structures (its large number of members - 17 - and its clean sweep of appointees every five years) and about the changes in funding procedures introduced by The Arts Plan 1999-2001, have been fast and furious.
Many practitioners and small arts organisations are dismayed at the complicated and bureaucratic application procedures for multi-annual funding and are dissatisfied with the quality of the Arts Council executive's communication with them. Yet few of these concerns have been aired in the public domain, not even in the Letters Page of this newspaper. Now's their chance.
The issues raised in Sile de Valera's discussion document are far from theoretical. To recap: it suggests, among other things, that the Arts Council, established by the Arts Act of 1951 as a politically independent body at arm's length from government, might become an "advisory Arts Council". This would "advise and assist the government, through [Ms de Valera's] department, in developing national arts policy and strategic planning for the arts". The document goes on to suggest that a second agency, "an Executive Arts Board with appropriate administrative and management structures might be established".
While the phrase "appropriate administrative and management structures" suggests efficiency and convenience - perhaps by-passing, for example, the need for the time-consuming formulation of arts plans every few years, it does not touch on the most essential aspect of the work of any body involved in the allocation of funds to the arts sector: the application of primarily cultural criteria to artists' work and to the ongoing development of arts organisations.
In order for an Executive Arts Board to be taken seriously by the arts sector, it would need to demonstrate a commitment to the arts that far exceeds managerial or administrative considerations. Yet the Minister's document as a whole is conspicuously lacking in articulation or definitions of the central role of culture in public and private life - in other words, of the principles underlying any arts legislation.
The discussion document can be read on the web at www.heanet.ie/natlib. Submissions to the Department by e-mail should be sent to: slynam@ealga.ie
The BBC's planned live broadcasts of two operas from this year's Wexford Festival Opera, which begins tonight, came within a hair's breadth of being cancelled due to a broadcasting rights row stirred up by RTE. It all centred on whether or not RTE had negotiated full European Broadcasting Union rights with the festival. If it had, the BBC was in trouble; if not, the BBC could proceed as planned.
RTE claimed it had negotiated EBU rights for this year. The Wexford Festival maintained the opposite. Having taken the issue to the wire, RTE has now agreed a compromise. Lyric FM's relays will be shifted to the days the BBC had planned its live broadcasts, so that face can be saved and a spirit of co-production can descend on all the parties. E is ever so proud of its support of the Wexford Festival, it's hard to see what Cutting off BBC Radio 3's listenership - Wexford Festival's largest, with a weekly reach of just under two million - would certainly have done little for the festival, or, indeed, for RTE.
Have money, will travel: the Royal Irish Academy of Music has announced the creation of an annual Charles and Carol Acton Travel Bursary. The bursary, valued at £2,000, is open to second and third year students at the RIAM, to enable them to travel and study during the summer months. It has been set up in memory of the late Charles Acton, long-time music critic of The Irish Times, who was also - and for an even longer period, 44 years - a governor of the academy. His widow Carol, who attended the announcement of what the academy's director John O'Conor called "the single most significant financial award in the academy", had direct experience of the sort of barriers that the new bursary is intended to break down. As a young music student, she found herself in that most heart-breaking of situations, of being unable to take up the offer of a place abroad because she couldn't raise enough money. The first award of the new bursary will be made after auditions and interviews to be held next February.
