When Patricia Quinn was appointed Director of the Arts Council a year ago, Paddy Woodworth wrote in a Saturday Profile in this newspaper: "[Her] appointment has been greeted with caution and a degree of fear by many of her peers." Why this caution? Why this fear? For a writer like myself, who has only met Quinn briefly in the course of work, the possible explanations are her rather cold formality with those she does not know personally and her obvious intellect, coupled with the fact that she thinks carefully before she speaks, and her ideas are expressed in meticulously formed sentences. It is a great relief when she accidentally unearths two bars of chocolate from her bag during the interview and admits they are "emergency supplies".
Quinn's own explanation is given laughingly, and is mouthed, so that it doesn't register on the interview tape: "I'm a woman." Certainly, ambition, ability and self-assurance in a woman are seen as a threat, and this must figure in the impression some have of her; but Quinn goes on: "I can't allow myself to think that. I don't. . . I don't. . ." Was I guilty of sex stereotyping when I asked her how she managed her job with two small daughters, Ellen (7) and Alice (one year)?
"I have great help," she answers. "I have a woman who works for me who takes care of my children during the day. I think she likes it. . . I see a lot of them after work and at weekends and I try to keep a lot of privacy for that. Some people form family relationships which work very well. Some people have relationships with people outside the family which work very well - like a grandmother figure, or whatever."
Later she rings me up and takes issue with the question: would I have asked it of Colm O Briain or Ciaran Benson? It's a fair point; but it's also true to say that it must have taken nerves of steel to take up the position of Director of the Arts Council just a couple of months after the birth of her second child. She seems surprised to be asked why she wanted the job: "Because I suppose everyone wants to make a difference - who's serious about the career they're in, the business they're in."
Patricia Quinn has been in the "business" of arts management since 1984, when she joined the Arts Council, first as music and opera officer; she later also became development officer. She had graduated in history from TCD two years before, and had worked there as a book conservationist. Her interest in music was intense, and she is still a keen cellist and pianist. But between her current job at the Council and the last one, she was immersed in a very different world as Cultural Director of Temple Bar Properties.
At first she had doubts about applying for the Arts Council job, because she thought: "I'm in a different gear now." A different gear? "I was working in an organisation which was a very interesting mix of public and private sectors. Public and private funding, values, relationships, and I found that really interesting." Did she meet with resistance when she re-joined the Arts Council with her new outlook? Patricia Quinn could have taught our five Presidential candidates a few things about diplomacy: "One of the interesting things about the Arts Council is its flexibility. It's very much a changing organisation, the members change by statute every five years - the Minister may decide to keep people on the council into a second term and that often happens - and the staff changes often too and that's also a good thing. So I found enormous interest here in following through some of the things that were already in hand and some of the things that I brought to the table as well, and resistance wouldn't be part of the vocabulary I would use to describe anything I've met."
There is a lack of clarity in many people's minds as to what the job of Director of the Arts Council, created by Charles Haughey's amendment to the Arts Act in 1973, entails. Its few holders have seemed to interpret the role in different ways, and no two more so that the last two incumbents, Colm O Briain and Adrian Munnelly. While O Briain was constantly in the public eye, Munnelly seemed to stand in the shadow, allowing the chairman of the council since 1993, Ciaran Benson, to be the public face of the council. In fact, the independence and supremacy of the council itself is firmly enshrined in the Arts Act, and Quinn's official role is to work as the council's facilitator. In the past, there has been tension between the council and the administrative staff about the balance of power to the extent that a council member once told a member of the administrative staff, at a council meeting, to stop talking.
Quinn defines her role: "To make sure the council is picking the right things to do and is doing them well." Isn't that tantamount to dictating the council's decisions? Quinn sees her role as that of information-gathering "so that the Arts Council looks to me to make concrete the kinds of things that they're observing and to say `The implications of that are this. The ways that we might technically get on with doing about that are these.' I am a ways and means person, if you like." If the council officers and director choose and shape what information they give to the council, don't they almost set the council up to make certain decisions?
"I think it's very important that if we're gate-keepers, we should be transparent gate-keepers. There should be no possibility that people outside the walls feel that there's information we're standing in the way of." She adds: "My aim is to make sure that that process is again working virtuously, in a way which brings the maximum information, but in a way which is managed. I'd be kidding you if I said it wasn't being managed. It has to be."
Among the decisions of Quinn's predecessor, Adrian Munnelly, which is most vividly remembered is his ordering of the shredding of 200 copies of Brian Kennedy's magnificent, outspoken and politically sensitive history of the council, Dreams And Responsibilities, in 1991. Quinn says that the story of the book's political sensitivity - specifically, of the possibility it might have offended Charles Haughey and his advisor, Anthony Cronin - is "greatly exaggerated", but shed any more light on why it ended up being pulped. She describes the work as "wonderful" and it will be reissued before the end of the year, but without an addendum explaining the pulping: "It is part of the history of the Arts Council, but ask any historian - you need to put some time and some distance between yourself and the past before you can write about it as history."
Quinn certainly gives no hostages to fortune in discussing her own relationship with Fianna Fail, and specifically the Minister for Arts, Sile de Valera. The work of the council and the ministry she describes as "synergistic" and declares herself optimistic that de Valera will secure the necessary funds to complete the council's five-year plan for the arts next year in the December Budget, as the Programme for Government promises.
Quinn would plan for the council to "bookend" the Plan with a period of research as to how effective it was, and then set about writing a new one. How does she feel about de Valera's stated preference for funding the Abbey Theatre through her own department as a national institution, with a "ring-fenced" allocation?
"She hasn't told us that," replies Quinn, to which I replied that she had told me and I had reported it. "We haven't discussed that particular issue yet with the Minister and if we were to open the discussion, we wouldn't do it here. . . Personally I think the people who are involved in this whole messy and very public set of issues around the Abbey - I suppose `messy' is the wrong word, but they're complex and there's a lot of threads - the Minister and her office are very well versed in the facts and personally I'd be surprised if there's any precipitate action taken by anybody."
She rebuffs the suggestion made by the Abbey that they were not consulted about the possibility of their moving to the proposed Opera House on the docks, which the Arts Council announced suddenly during the summer: "They didn't rule it in and they didn't rule it out."
She defends the announcement, which came before any feasibility study had been carried out, because it stimulated discussion; the council was simply recommending that building a major lyric theatre on the docks be discussed, because no other such theatre existed. This could receive touring theatre which currently comes to the Cork Opera House and the Grand Opera House in Belfast, but not to Dublin, because, she says, "the Gaiety is too small."
Could the Gaiety not be adapted, as the Break For The Border management said in a report before it put the place up for sale? I confessed I had not read the whole report, and Quinn admitted: "I haven't read it either." But the problem with the Gaiety is, she says, that it is a land-locked site: "The Olympia could have been adapted. When I was in Temple Bar Properties there was a lot of talk about that, but it was in private ownership and that opportunity was lost."
As for the Gaiety's now uncertain future, as it sits on the market? "One of the solutions would be for the Arts Council to buy the Gaiety," says Quinn. "It's a heritage building and it's a theatre and it should stay a theatre. We've certainly said as much to Dublin Corporation." The corporation could be a potential owner, or part-owner "if they would contemplate, if Dublin would contemplate a municipal theatre, like Galway has and Waterford has." Facing each other over Quinn's large desk in the Arts Council's beautiful Merrion Square offices, and moving cultural institutions around in our mind like pegs on a board, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we are talking about art.
Our professional lives tend to cross at starchy public functions, which are frankly a world away from an artist facing a blank page or a blank canvas: "It's a big distance, as you say, to cover, and you have to have a big capacity in your head to remember one while you're in the middle of the other."
Her "Managing The Arts" conference in 1991 floated the issue of the upgrading of the quality of arts management; and for Quinn, the issue is quality - she sees no reason why an arts manager shouldn't work to the same level that artists demand of themselves.
"Make no mistake about it," she adds, however, "there is always a conflict, or a tension, between the professional practitioner and the person who administers that practice." On a recent fact-finding visit to the US with Minister de Valera, it struck her, however "that the value we place on the individual artist in this country is quite extraordinary. It informs the values of people like me and it informs the values of the Arts Council and the political values of a State which gives tax exemption to artists." Is this related to the value we have traditionally given to priests?
"That comparison makes me nervous, because priests have an authority which is not necessarily earned. It belongs to some sort of organised thing. Whereas the particular condition of an artist is precisely that they're an individual and they're not part of a church. I think that it's good that a society have people in it who are engaged in a struggle to make something which only they know is good or bad. I think that is a very important concept. If you have a child, it's something you try to communicate to them. It's more important that you have self-respect and value your own work than anyone else's opinion."
