The grants awarded by Culture Ireland last year included 30,000 for Ireland's participation at the Venice Visual Biennale, €40,306 to the Galway Arts Festival towards the cost of performing Trad at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005 and €24,000 for CoisCéim Dance Theatre, which also brought its show Chamber Made to Edinburgh Fringe.
At the other end of the funding scale are individual artists such as Daithí Ó hÓgáin, who got €491 to cover participation at the 5th Celtic-Scandinavian- Baltic Folklore Symposium in Iceland, and Helen O'Leary, whose exhibition and stint as artist-in-residence in Australia was aided by a grant of €1,400.
One of the chief beneficiaries of Culture Ireland funding was the Ireland Literature Exchange, which saw its 2004 €90,000 Cultural Relations Committee allocation increased to 150,000.
"The increase allowed us to extend both our geographical reach and our activities," says ILE director Sinéad Mac Aodha. "First of all it enabled us to attend five international book fairs last year, which is crucial to our primary activity of supporting translations of books by Irish writers . . . One of the books we supported was a selection of Irish women's poetry into Estonian; and the extra funding allowed us to send some poets to the actual launch. That's a big step, because it means real contact between writers and the public on the ground in Estonia - and it was something we just could not do until we got this extra funding."
Although its entire organisation consists of Mac Aodha and just one other staff member, ILE supported 90 translations last year. Some 12 of those - including Shade by Neil Jordan, Cowboys and Indians by Joseph O'Connor and Uncle Silas by Sheridan le Fanu - were into Bulgarian.
"We welcome the Culture Ireland draft strategy," says Mac Aodha. "And we were particularly pleased to see it signal three areas of particular cultural interest - Asia, the EU accession states and the countries of the Irish disapora - because two of them have been very important to our work over a number of years.
"We looked at those territories and saw that there are a huge number of people there - many of whom are, increasingly, choosing to come to Ireland to work and live - and that they have virtually no books about Ireland available to them. We're building links
with India, we attended a book festival in Beijing and we're planning to host two Chinese translators in Ireland
in 2006."
Bringing translators to Ireland is akin, she says, to setting off a "domino effect" in the international literary world.
"There are people
out there who are already cultural ambassadors for Ireland - for example, Krista
Kaer, who is a publisher and translator in Estonia, and who has translated Oscar Wilde, Seamus Deane and Tom Murphy. One of the best ways to foster international cultural exchange is to develop that network of 'unofficial' cultural ambassadors - but they need to be formally recognised so their knowledge, and the network, can be exploited."
