Roisin McDonough, the newly-appointed chief executive of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), must be wondering about the amount of work she took on with her post. When The Irish Times went to interview her in Belfast last week, she was accompanying Northern Ireland's Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure, Michael McGimpsey, on a tour of ACNI's Malone Road offices. She then spent almost two hours with this reporter, followed by a further Arts Council meeting - but McDonough doesn't take up her post formally until October.
Describing herself as coming from a "radical" political tradition, which questions perceived truths, McDonough, a Northerner by birth, is one of a generation of Northern women whose ability to lead is gradually being recognised. A graduate in Economics, Sociology and Politics from Trinity College, Dublin, she is the first female chief executive of the Arts Council in recent times, and articulates confidently the role it will play in the North.
"My vision for the Arts Council is that it will make a significant contribution to promoting cultural life in Northern Ireland. It can do that through a number of different methods. Clearly, we need to promote and celebrate the creative endeavours that many of our artists and arts organisations have been involved in. We need to ensure that the profile is developed and that the infrastructure is strengthened as a consequence of that.
"That's not simply or exclusively because arts have an intrinsic benefit per se or an integrity per se . . . but also because as a society, as a community, as an economy, we are increasingly reminded of the powerful contribution that arts and culture can make in terms of community life, in terms of economic and social progress, and that, I think, is the way people are increasingly seeing the arts."
She emphasises the role of the arts in creating employment and acting as a catalyst within the economy. She stresses "the increasing importance attached to the role of the creative industries" and expresses a hope that the council "will play a strong, supportive developmental role" in facilitating the North's creative impulse.
Fine words, honestly spoken, and few would disagree with her. Trouble is, the standing of the Arts Council among many artists in the North is not good; many regard it as being out of touch and elitist. Why is the council held in such low regard and what can be done about it?
McDonough answers that "it is inevitable that there are going to be tensions between artists, arts organisations and an arts body that is designated as one of the support and funding mechanisms as well as having the role of offering policy advice and developing and implementing strategies. I think that one should not be overly defensive about that.
"We welcome the kind of creative tensions and discussions around those issues, and that is part of the impassioned debate there is about art, because people do feel strongly about it. They do have strong views and strong concerns and I think that is something that should not be seen simply as a negative, carping kind of `always critical of the Arts Council' type approach. I certainly hope the Arts Council would not see it like that. As an individual . . . I would certainly not be taking those criticisms in that manner.
"But, on top of that, the Arts Council is now at a stage in its own history, in its own organisational development, where it is poised to regroup itself and reconfigure what it has been doing in the light of the new devolved administration [and] in the light of an important review [Opening Up the Arts by Anthony Everitt and Annabel Jackson], which was a serious review of the Arts Council's previous work. The maturity of the Arts Council is there in order to take that forward and to positively develop the kind of policy and strategy and implementation . . . and to do that in conjunction with, perhaps, some of our keenest critics."
It is an interesting and detailed answer which offers insights into the future relationships between the council and its clients.
McDonough, one feels, will certainly not shirk from engaging with even the most vociferous of critics. Additionally, she is not going to accept that the council is home to boorish bureaucrats with no interest or part to play in the arts.
She argues that Opening Up the Arts has been welcomed and that the arts community is being actively addressed through "a positive process of engagement". She is "content that we are moving in the right direction".
The review is a central plank in the revitalisation of the council. Formally launched in May, it was a detailed critique of the council's last arts policy, "To the Millennium". A range of (at times blunt) suggestions were made regarding issues facing the council, its organisational structure and its role in promoting art and culture.
A consultation process is ongoing and a new arts plan is to be in place for April 2001. It will be McDonough's job to co-ordinate the process and ensure the implementation of the completed policy. It will be her first big test as chief executive and she will undoubtedly be under great scrutiny from the arts community to see if she and the council can deliver significant change. While she says she is unable to give a "definitive response" to the process at present, she stresses research on aspects of the report has already been initiated and that there will be delivery.
Still, will even the most thorough research remove the causes of dissatisfaction with the council? Last year saw a major row erupt over the withdrawal of funding from Forced Upon Us, a controversial play about rape and the RUC's role in policing nationalist areas. "Artistic failings," said the Arts Council; "censorship," said Dubbeljoint, the play's producers.
Equally fraught is the council's relationship with west Belfast's annual community festival, Feile an Phobail. Feile organisers are vocal and frequent critics of what they perceive to be the council's shortcomings in support.
McDonough doesn't see the council being in an oppositional role to individual groups. Indeed, she says, it isn't "specifically a west Belfast issue, though it might have manifested itself there on particular occasions. That kind of dialogue between the council and some of our potential arts organisations and community arts organisations - people requesting funding from us - is a dialogue, and because something is not funded in one instance doesn't mean to say that that relationship is severed as a consequence. We would always want to continue that dialogue and that goes right across the spectrum."
"However," she says, "the arts council has the serious business of offering advice, support and guidance in terms of artistic excellence. That is one of its areas of expertise . . . Having said it is important to maintain that kind of dialogue, I think you have to keep talking to people and work through a kind of process, and that these simple, stereotypical kinds of divisions don't help that, don't aid that.
McDonough has been chief executive of the West Belfast Partnership, an urban regeneration agency, for the past two years. Is she an advocate then for west Belfast?
"I would hope very much that simply because I have happened to work in west Belfast for a couple of years, that that doesn't necessarily identify me unduly with one particular community, because I have also worked in the context of north Belfast and I've worked in Craigavon. I'm here for all communities, I'm here for all arts organisations, and I'm here to listen and learn and work with and develop and build relationships in the pursuit of both artistic excellence and social inclusion. These are not incompatible."
Her own background is primarily in the community arena. She was director of Brownlow Community Trust, an anti-poverty programme based in Craigavon, Co Armagh; a team leader with Making Belfast Work; and a director of the Training Network for Women. Given her lack of involvement in the arts, does she think that the job of chief executive is one of just delivering "product", irrespective of what that product might be? "No," she says, "you should never do a job unless you have great enthusiasm and interest and a passion for it. I'm not interested in being CEO of a widget-manufacturing company."
While she might be perceived as being weak in the arts, she refuses to be pigeonholed: "Like many people I am not a professional, practising artist . . . but I do have a very strong, keen layperson's interest in many of the art forms and disciplines and practices. I think, hopefully, with a keen layperson's interest, I can bring an empathy and understanding and can appreciate how in turn people might be either put off or not see the merit or value of a particular show or a particular painting or a particular book."
Yet is it not one of the problems about the North, and about art in the North, that many communities seek to pigeonhole themselves, that Feile an Phobail and the Queen's Festival at Belfast, for example, aim at very particular audiences, to the exclusion of all others?
For McDonough, the challenge to overcome that is "to develop policies and proper strategies to enable us to celebrate, promote and manage cultural diversity in our society. We are aware, all of us, acutely aware, that we are coming out of 30 years of the most horrendous conflict and that as we as a society manage that transitional process to what we all hope will be a more peaceful future . . . we need to have respect and patient understanding which enables us to appreciate the other traditions which exist in our society - sometimes painfully, sometimes side-by-side in an uneasy co-existence, but, hopefully, increasingly at least sensitive and aware of and appreciative of where each other is coming from."
McDonough is a regular theatre-goer and has a particular regard for the work of Frank McGuinness and Gary Mitchell. She likes to go on holidays to places where she wants to see "something of interest". This cultural wanderlust has taken her to Mexico to view the work of Frieda Kahlo and to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which was "uplifting". She also freely admits to watching The Simpsons "because I like that kind of cartoon format. I have a broad range of tastes". That is going to be invaluable for handling the disparate and competing demands of her new position.
