The Government has been busy promoting Irish culture during its presidency of the EU. But how can we do a better job the rest of the time, asks Arminta Wallace
It may sound like an aunt with a penchant for the National Concert Hall of an evening, but the business of presenting an acceptable national image to the rest of the world - also known as cultural diplomacy - is a serious one. It's also a matter of serious money. During its presidency of the EU, for example, the Republic will shell out almost €4 million on a programme of cultural events designed to impress whoever might be watching.
Funding on such a lavish scale would have been unimaginable when, in 1949, a Cultural Relations Committee was first set up to advise the Department of Foreign Affairs on the promotion of Irish culture abroad. Since 2001 this voluntary body has been reporting to the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, but last year's Arts Act upped the ante, giving the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism "statutory responsibility for promoting the arts within and without the State".
The question, of course, is how best to do this. Should it be done by a specially established agency and should such an agency be under direct government control? Should it employ Irish staff in other countries or local people? A good starting point is to look at what our fellow Europeans do. The highly centralised Dutch system, for example, sees its ministry of foreign affairs and ministry of education, culture and science jointly manage a budget for international cultural co-operation. Some countries rely on the occasional one-off event supported through the cultural section of an embassy. But the most familiar and possibly most successful organ of cultural diplomacy has been that of the quasi-independent cultural institute.
The French were first, as the director of the Alliance Française in Dublin, François Chambraud, explains. "In 1880 the French were realising their language was in danger as opposed to the English language, and they decided to try and organise a network of schools which would use the money they made from giving French language courses abroad to carry out a cultural mission. And the idea - which was the great idea at that time already - was to make them local. So you're talking to somebody who's in charge of an Irish company, with an Irish board of directors, but if you were calling somebody who was in charge of a Colombian alliance it would be a Colombian company. The whole idea . . . was to avoid costing too much to the French taxpayer."
There are now 1,100 alliances worldwide, teaching French to more than 400,000 students. The Dublin alliance is one of the biggest in Europe, with 3,000 students on its books - still, it doesn't exactly place a huge burden on the French taxpayer. "Our subsidy from Paris is €4,000," says Chambraud with a chuckle. Besides its programme of monthly exhibitions, seminars, film screenings and the like, the alliance is involved in bigger events, such as the forthcoming Franco-Irish Literary Festival at the Chester Beatty Library, in Dublin, from April 2nd to 4th. "This is a very good example of the alliance and the French embassy working hand in hand and putting the same amount of money into something which represents the literary vision of France in a country which, as you know, is very bookish," says Chambraud.
For the Germans, cultural policy is the "third leg" of an integrated foreign and security policy programme. The Goethe-Institut also began as a language school, but in 1976 its status as a cultural institute was formalised in a treaty with the German foreign ministry. "What we do abroad is funded by the government, so we do have a close link with the foreign ministry, although we're not part of it. We're not diplomats," says the institute's director, Matthias Müller-Wieferig.
His background is in journalism - he worked as a theatre and literary critic - and, he says, the institute is particularly proud of attracting both teachers and administrators from a wide range of professions. It is also, he says, proud of its independence. "There are continual problems between the arts and politics, so we find it very important to have complete independence, because sometimes politics and the arts don't go together that well," he says with a wry smile. "Obviously, if you put up exhibitions or political discussions or historical whatever, there might be speakers who are not in line with government policy."
A clause in its treaty requires Goethe-Institut Dublin to inform the German embassy of its cultural plans. Should the embassy disapprove it can put in a veto - and the whole row will be taken to the institute's head office, in Munich, to be sorted out, as Müller-Wieferig puts it, "at a higher level". But, he adds, in practice this very rarely happens. "In any case," he says, "we don't see ourselves as exporting German culture to other countries; the most important thing for us is to be in dialogue with our host country."
When he arrived in Dublin, two years ago, Müller-Wieferig ended the institute's in-house cultural programme, preferring to concentrate on building close contacts with, for example, Dublin Theatre Festival, Galway Film Fleadh and Dún Laoghaire's Poetry Now, providing cutting-edge advice about the hottest ensembles, film directors or writers on the German scene - and often instituting contacts that result in Irish ensembles, directors and writers working in Germany.
The institute is deeply involved with the training of German teachers in Ireland: it is responsible for the certification of private language schools and provides an inspector to the Department of Education and Science.
The annual budget for the Goethe-Institut worldwide is an enviable €278 million. Even so, says Müller-Wieferig, funding can be hard to come by. "Last October we launched a patrons and friends scheme, and we now have support from 11 Irish and German companies. Everyone in the cultural field has to rely on extra funding. Thanks to this money we manage to present one big musical event a year."
The British Council is slightly different to the national cultural institutes: its brief includes development work as well as promotion of arts and sciences - and language teaching. More than two-thirds of the council's annual budget of some £400 million (€600 million) is earned by the council itself through English- language teaching in 120 centres around the world and the supervision of British examination services.
The rest comes from government funding, although as Tony Reilly, director of the British Council's Dublin office, explains: "We do work very closely with embassies and with the foreign office, but we retain our differences as well. We stay at arm's length from the government policy of the day. British embassies around the world are beginning to be aware that people often have an outdated perception of the UK. We've been ahead of that game for a long time, because we've always been very keen to represent the UK in all its glory - or not, as the case may be."
The British Council has been operating in Ireland since 1989. "Ireland is unique because of the enormous overlap and sheer volume of cultural exchange that happens anyway," says Reilly. "Our challenge has been to find areas that we can make a difference in. Something that's new, something that might not happen here otherwise, and not necessarily high art. The Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire has become a regular partner, because there's a convergence there of using the arts to share experiences of multiculturalism and diversity - bringing over artists who are, in their own right, worthy of engaging audiences but who also make people aware of how multicultural Britain has worked its way through in the arts."
Like his colleagues at the Alliance Française and Goethe-Institut, Reilly, who was based in southern Africa before he came to Dublin, stresses that "cultural relations" are not a matter of one-way cultural traffic. "It's aboutlearning, sharing, working in partnership. Everywhere I've worked for the British Council there have been differences, but the common denominator is a real belief in strengthening people-to-people contacts. Our experience suggests that there's a real benefit from having strong country teams on the ground. They're central to the work."
Although Ireland might aspire to a model of cultural diplomacy based on the cultural-institute idea, we lack the resources to set up a network of cultural institutes from scratch. Whatever body eventually takes responsibility for promoting Irish culture abroad will have to use existing expertise, which begs such questions as whether, and to what extent, such bodies as the Arts Council should be involved. The council feels it should, and it has made a lengthy and lucid submission to the international arts policy review in which it points out the many successes of individual Irish artists and companies abroad in the recent past. But, it adds, isolated projects and individual triumphs are not enough.
"There is no policy framework to establish priorities, guide decisions or to assess impacts - short or long-term. As a result, individual projects are often driven by demand rather than by their fit into a wider picture and a long-term plan. The projects themselves take place in isolation and make little contribution to a continuous learning process."
Not surprisingly, the Arts Council submission stresses the need to stay at arm's length from government control and the desirability of peer evaluation of artistic merit - concerns that are central to its own remit. It also points out that care should be taken not to place artists working in the Irish language at a disadvantage through lack of adequate translation facilities. In conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, it plumps for an Irish cultural council along the lines of the Australian model, the Australia International Cultural Council, set up in 1988 with significant input from the Australian equivalent of the Arts Council.
Value for money will be a major factor in the department's calculations, but funding is just one of the issues in the cultural-diplomacy area that is, as the 21st century settles in, becoming less clear-cut. According to Matthias Müller-Wieferig, the scene is set for a major funding free-for-all as Brussels begins to take a more transnational view of what constitutes culture. Co-operation and joint projects will be the order of the day from now on, he says, in anticipation of which the Goethe-Institut has just signed a co-operation agreement with the Alliance Française. "The idea of nationalism in culture is, for me, a very old-fashioned one - quite obsolete," says Müller-Wieferig. The idea of what might constitute German culture has, he adds, undergone a radical change since the institute was founded. "Multiculturalism is big on our agenda. If you look at German films, for example, many of them have been written by Turkish directors, including Fatih Akin, who won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival this year. Some of the most vital elements in German culture are coming from Turkey."
For Tony Reilly of the British Council, one of the most important lessons to be learned about cultural diplomacy has to do with being confident enough in your own culture to realise that if you show it off to people they won't necessarily applaud. "The British Council in Ireland might get a collection of people together to come and look at British policy around asylum seekers and refugees or we might bring a group of arts practitioners to the Edinburgh festival to experience a packaged British Council showcase of work that's going on that year. We don't try to make sure that everything they take back is positive. On the contrary, it might be about saying, look at some of the problems, some of the contradictions we face. We simply share the experience and let people decide for themselves."
The international policy review will doubtless mull over these and many other questions before making a decision. Could - should - an Irish cultural agency earn money by teaching English? Will our definition of culture embrace the kind of person-to-person links that have been established between Ireland and Lebanon, for example, during many years of UN peacekeeping work? Its answers will be fascinating, not least because the cultural policy designed to influence how others see us is bound, in the end, to be a startlingly accurate reflection of how we see ourselves.
Vast amounts of information are available from www.alliance-francaise.ie, www.goethe.de and www.britishcouncil.org. The Arts Council's submission to the arts policy review is at www.artscouncil.ie
