It hasn't always been easy keeping Dublin Writers Festival afloat. But Jack Gilligan has helped to make it one of the city's flagship events, writes Shane Hegarty
A couple of years ago, a woman took to phoning Jack Gilligan about once a week, asking him when he was going to remove the evil from O'Connell Street. She was referring to the wildly colourful fountain that appeared briefly on Dublin's main street, bent over Anna Livia, drenching the fast-food cartons and cigarette butts that decorated her hair. "This woman would ask: 'When is that dragon going to be taken away?' " remembers Gilligan. "I would say it's not a dragon, it's a bird. It was inspired by the work in the Book of Kells or the Book of Durrow. But she was not convinced. She thought it was evil."
When RTÉ conducted a vox pop beneath the fountain, one man said that whoever put it there should be sacked. If they'd done that, though, they would have been removing one of the most visible parts of the Dublin arts scene. As Dublin City Council arts officer, Gilligan has guided the capital's arts policy and goaded its politicians since becoming its inaugural incumbent, 10 years ago. He has been behind plenty that is not so contentious as the street art: community projects, writers-in-residence, arts workshops and bursaries.
Next month, though, he turns his attention to the fifth annual Dublin Writers Festival, the flagship event of the office, which in only a few years has developed into an event of both international stature and domestic importance. The initial motivation was straightforward. "I was very conscious that Dublin had this reputation for being a cultural city and that it would be known the world over for its literary heritage, yet there was nothing to manifest that in the city."
With Pat Boran, then City of Dublin writer-in-residence, as festival director, the first steps were tentative. A single free event was held at St Anne's Church on Dawson Street on the evening of Bloomsday 1997. The queue stretched around the corner, and the event was packed. Gilligan was amazed at the response, and he and Boran widened the event into a proper, four-day festival the following year.
Despite its immediate success, difficulties with Arts Council funding saw the event disappear from the calendar in 1999. "The next year I decided we were going ahead with a festival one way or another - if the Arts Council is on board, fine, if not, then we'll do it smaller. And I remember thinking at the time that we would do it Mother Teresa-style: God will provide." The Arts Council did come on board, and the festival was another success, developing an identity not just with the public but also with writers, who appreciated cheques in advance and the welcome packs on their hotel beds.
Each year, weighty reputations mix with local authors, household names with unknown quantities. This year will see another round of the national Poetry Slam competition as well as a reading by Orhan Pamuk, who last week won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. There will be an event of Irish and Scots Gaelic poetry, as well as appearances by Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes and Andrew O'Hagan.
"What we try to do each year, both from the writers' point of view and the audience's point of view, is to focus on different areas of activity and interest. This year, in the case of writers, you have the big names of Zadie Smith and Andrew O'Hagan, and there's an audience out there ready made for them. On the other hand, you have to look at new writers who are just emerging or who aren't so well known. Also, as is witnessed again this year in the case of the Arab writers, there are the people nobody knows anything about.
"Last year, when Pat told me he was going to have five Nordic writers at the same event, I thought that it sounded like folly, a really crazy idea. But it worked an absolute treat. I think the festival is really at its best when it's bringing in, almost surreptitiously, other work from far-flung parts of the globe."
Although the aims remain the same, he says there are still plenty of challenges. He would like to have more children's writing, for example. Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl and, more recently, The Wish List, will be the genre's sole representative this year.
With a personal interest in theatre, Gilligan would like more playwrights involved. It is the general aims, however, that most occupy him. "There is no doubt that, like so many areas of the arts, there's an audience out there. There's a huge spectrum of the population, a huge potential audience, that hasn't yet been fully tapped into or hasn't been given the opportunity or access to literature or theatre or whatever. I think that's where we have to focus our endeavours."
It's a common theme for Gilligan. As an arts officer he sees his role as bringing the arts to those who may not even realise they could be interested. "Theatre is no more expensive than a night in the pub. And I've been saying for many years - and I'm not being smug but just stating what I think are the facts - that if you've never been to the theatre, if you had to make the choice between a play and a pint, what are you going to choose? The chances are you've had many pints and you know you'll enjoy it and have a good night. But if you can introduce people to that other experience, they can have them both pretty much at the same time. That is the challenge."
He talks of musical-appreciation classes run by the arts office after which people approached him to say that they had changed their lives. Of helping people to rediscover forgotten artistic leanings. "One of the things that saddens me is that people love to encourage children to paint and express themselves, but when a person gets to 12 or 13 they get told, right, it's time for real life, and it's relegated for some reason. There are certain things that people are allowed do when they're very young, and we impose certain regulations on them when they're older."
Gilligan, who was born in Sligo, grew up with an interest in theatre, remembering the impact of seeing his first professional production, of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. "When I look back I can't tell why. I was only 10 at the time so was much too young to understand it."
A career public servant, he first learned the value of arts as a tool for personal and community development while working in the community office of Dublin County Council. He would bring to the suburbs the likes of Daghdha Dance Company, Rough Magic and productions from Dublin Theatre Festival. Yet he also learnt how difficult it could be to persuade people that it was worthwhile. Even now, he says, many Dubliners who live beside the Abbey Theatre or the National Gallery of Ireland have never stepped inside.
"I suppose one thing I learnt was that it isn't enough to just drop something in. I guess it's a lesson that might have been learnt but I don't think has fully been, even in more recent times, when a lot of public money has gone into arts centres around the country, but then there aren't the resources to programme them properly or do the audience development that needs to be done. People will not automatically go there. It's back to the choice between the play and the pint. If people are not familiar with it, they will be reluctant to try, even if it is in their own area."
He is also well versed in the mechanics of the public service, of how progress tends to be steady rather than spectacular. "There's no doubt it's slow and not at the pace I'd like it to be, but again I've had a lot of experience with the public service, of how that's the way things are, that things cannot happen overnight and the resources are not always there."
This year, those resources have remained static, with the overall arts-office programme having a budget of about €500,000 - €1 for each inhabitant. Given the climate, he says the arts office is very lucky that its Arts Council funding did not drop this year. The Government's upcoming arts-and-cultural strategy report also gives him cause for optimism. Meanwhile, his offices, with a staff of four, will soon move to new premises on Foley Street. It will incorporate a dance centre, something he hopes is another step in the development of proper facilities for the capital.
In the meantime, there is Dublin Writers Festival to look forward to, with the Arab writers his highlight. And then it will be back to dealing with the artistic demands of Dubliners. They must be a tough audience to play to. "They can be, but that wouldn't be the way I feel about it. I just think that people's experiences haven't been broad enough, that they haven't been given the opportunity and that, given it, they can say, yes, this is for me and I can have an opinion on it. It doesn't matter that everybody should like the same thing. If we did, we'd all be very boring."
For booking details, see below
Chapter and verse: This year's line-up
Eileen Battersby
Reading is life's ultimate private pleasure, yet it is always enticing to have a chance to hear writers read and, in some cases, perform their words aloud. Dublin Writers Festival, now in its fifth year, remains diverse and promises four busy days during which readers will be spoilt for choice.
Poetry has a strong presence in this year's programme, which opens with the Briton James Fenton and the Australian Peter Porter. Fenton is an original critic; Porter has over the past 40 years produced a consistently fine body of work. The US poet Carolyn Forche has written as powerfully about events in El Salvador as Fenton has about Cambodia. Her new collection, Blue Hour, has just been published.
Another distinguished US poet, Ellen Hinsey, will share the stage with Forche in what should prove a festival highlight. Hinsey's visionary meditations exploring contemporary life possess a metaphysical quality. Hers is one of the most haunting voices at work in US and, indeed, international verse.
The widely translated Catalan Alex Susanna ranks among Europe's most interesting poets. Dedalus Press is publishing Forgotten Music, an English-language selection, to coincide with Susanna's festival appearance.
The Irish poetry contingent is led by Brendan Kennelly, John F. Deane, Vona Groarke and Peter Sirr; Irish-language poets such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Cathal Ó Searcaigh will join the Scots poets Meg Bateman and Iain Moireach in a celebration drawing on the recently published An Leabhar Mór, or The Great Book Of Gaelic.
Anyone interested in the evolution of a contemporary literature rooted in one of the greatest of ancient world civilisations will be drawn to Contemporary Arab Writing, which brings together a panel of writers from the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Tunisia and Syria.
Should the singular Glaswegian Alasdair Gray prove as entertaining in person as he is on the page, his festival invitation will have been inspired, as will his pairing with the Irish writer Dermot Healy. A must-see is the respective participation of two of Europe's most gifted younger writers: Ingo Schulze, the German author of 33 Moments Of Happiness and Simple Stories, and Marie Darrieussecq, who, since the publication of her surreal satiric debut, Pig Tales, in 1996, and through three subsequent novels, including her new book, A Brief Stay With The Living, helped to reinvigorate French fiction.
Thriller fans should note Criminal Inventions, featuring Michael Dibdin and Dominique Manotti, author of Rough Trade (based on a real murder) and To The Horses. Still on the subject of blood and violence, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, the newly announced IMPAC winner, will read from My Name Is Red, his hilarious mystery cum art-history extravaganza, at the closing gala.
Dublin Writers Festival runs from June 12th to June 15th. You can get more details from 01-6759816 or by visiting www.dublinwritersfestival.com. Bookings on 01-8721122
