There doesn’t appear to be a lot of excitement about this year’s budget, which will be unveiled to the usual chorus of fanfares and raspberries next Tuesday by Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe and Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath. It’s been extensively flagged in advance that there will be modest adjustments to income tax and some social welfare rates, along with a gradual winding down of those income and business support measures introduced during the pandemic. Media attention will focus as usual on the impact of these minimal changes on fictionalised households, along with analysis of the impact of specific measures on particular sectors. And we can expect carbon emissions-related issues to take up more space than previously.
Somewhere well down the agenda will be the allocations for the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. In previous years, these have been the occasion for expressions of deep disappointment, dismay or even outrage from the culture sector (including, on one occasion, from the chair of the Arts Council). In their eyes, successive governments have repeatedly failed to match their expansive promises with the delivery of cold, hard cash. And they're right.
Only two years ago, for example, in the final budget of the Fine Gael-led minority government, the Arts Council received an effective increase of less than 3 per cent, falling far short of what would have been required for then taoiseach Leo Varadkar's prior promise to double arts spending by 2025 to remain on track. That decision was seen as a clear breach of faith, despite then arts minister Josepha Madigan's assertion that the 2025 target was still viable.
A lot has happened since 2019, of course, not least the arrival of a pandemic which shut down much of the economy and caused an unprecedented intervention by the State in the form of financial supports for a broad range of sectors, including arts and entertainment. The result was the largest annual increase in arts funding in the history of the State. The Arts Council received an exchequer grant of €130 million, up from its pre-Covid level of €80 million. And the Government also provided direct subsidies and supports to a range of live performance events around the country.
So what now? The broader budgetary context envisages a steep reduction in emergency measures over the next 12-18 months as Ireland emerges from the Covid crisis. That's already happening in many sectors. A strong argument can be made that arts and entertainment took the heaviest blow of all, and endured the longest lockdown too, and will therefore need continuing support. But for advocacy organisations such as the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA), that means implicitly conceding that the increases were always going to be temporary, something it's understandably not keen to do.
In a forceful pre-budget submission, the NCFA has made the case that last year’s increases did no more than begin to redress a longstanding failure on the part of successive Irish governments.
“A decade on from the financial crisis,” it states, “government investment in the bodies that underwrite the artistic output of the nation, including the Arts Council, Culture Ireland, Creative Ireland and others, have barely recovered. Ireland continues to languish on the bottom rung of European investment in culture.”
The submission calls for an increase in Arts Council funding to €150 million next year, along with parallel increases to Culture Ireland (which promotes Irish arts internationally), extension of the current Creative Ireland supports for education, young people and communities, the ringfencing of local authorities’ arts funding budgets, enhancement of tax benefits for philanthropy, and a number of other issues. It also wants the Government to get moving on its pledge to introduce its promised Basic Income for Artists pilot scheme.
It’s a long and ambitions list, and let’s hope the NCFA won’t be too disappointed when virtually none of it comes to pass in Budget 2020. The difficult task facing Minister for Arts and Culture Catherine Martin in recent weeks – as she and her Cabinet colleagues jostled for recognition for their respective briefs – is that she will have been making her arguments in the context of a major winding-down of Covid-era spending. Whatever the decision-makers in the Department of Finance think of the criticism of Ireland’s dismal record of State support for the arts – and all the evidence is that it doesn’t particularly bother them – the chances that they will stick another 15 per cent on an Arts Council allocation which went up by 60 per cent last year are vanishingly small.
The realpolitik of the matter is that Martin will have been trying as hard as she can to hold on to as much of the Covid-era funding as possible, but that she’s unlikely to be completely successful. What success looks like in the world of pragmatic coalition politics remains to be seen.
