The 'refocusing' of FÁS's community employment schemes, which have for years operated as a crucial resource and subsidy in the arts, has led to many in theatres, publishers and studios losing work and has put organisations at risk, writes Belinda McKeon.
Imagine having not one but two Government bodies to support the arts. One provides the staff to run theatres, galleries and arts centres. It does it so well that the other organisation becomes concerned about the venues' over-reliance on this support and takes steps to help them become more sufficient: a 43 per cent rise in funding, a commitment to subsidise salaries.
Now imagine that not one but two Government bodies are devastating the arts. The staffing body and the funding body withdraw huge amounts of support within weeks of one another and the arts community is left reeling, with insufficient resources to produce work or to run venues.
Both scenarios should sound familiar: they represent the difference a mere three years can make for the arts in Ireland. That community has just had the cruellest of winters. Arts Council cuts in December of up to 60 per cent were only the half of it. The announcement in November that the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment was to cut some 6,000 jobs from the FÁS community-employment (CE) programme signalled crisis for arts workers all over the country.
Over some 15 years, the programme had provided venues and organisations with vital, and subsidised, staff for just about anything, from switchboard operation to set design. As FÁS moved to ring-fence disadvantaged groups and priority projects, protecting the areas of drugs rehabilitation, childcare services and health from the impact of cuts, and as the Arts Council simultaneously placed its funding emphasis on education and resource centres, it became obvious that these venues were facing ruin.
"Two last month, one today and we'll lose the last two in March," said Toby Dennett, director of the Sculptors' Society of Ireland, of the speed at which integral staff members were disappearing from before his eyes. Whether or not this was the kind of "gradual reduction" the Tánaiste had in mind when she told the Dáil that the schemes were being wound down to reflect the reduction in the number of long-term unemployed, this is the reality facing organisations such as the sculptors' society and venues such as the Crypt Arts Centre.
The Crypt, at Dublin Castle, has had a positive response from volunteers who want to keep it ticking over, but still the level of vulnerability that marks these organisations, and those who wait anxiously to hear the fates of their own community-employment schemes, is breathtaking.
Trapped in a cycle of dependency and destruction, waiting to hear the next piece of bad news or scraping by on brief reprieves, for all in the arts this is a desperately insecure time. Closure is a constant threat and plans for the future are tentative and impoverished.
It is a strange time, it could be argued, for the Government to wind down a scheme founded so communities could help themselves.
Many in the arts believe, however, that the crisis is the result more of bad faith than of bad timing by the Government. They feel the onslaught on their venues and their interests was inevitable not so much because the community-employment schemes had run their course, but because the outlay they represented, as expenditure on the arts, was always certain to be first in line for cuts.
"The way in which the CE cuts have been implemented reflects the policy of Mary Harney's department," says John O'Brien of the Crypt. "While it's unlikely that the Tánaiste instructed a complete cut of arts schemes, it was probably the case that once they had to cut back by a certain amount, because the arts are not on the Government's priority list, that's where she looked, and that's where the cuts hit."
But the Department and FÁS are ready with their answers. Asked to explain why funding for many art-related schemes had not been renewed, they mentioned "employment potential" and "progression to the open labour market" as "key factors" in the assessment of schemes. Behind the jargon, this seems to imply that the Government and FÁS are accusing arts-based schemes of failing to provide their participants with a transition to employment.
Thankfully, one FÁS source is refreshingly frank. "A project applies for funding on the basis of what it does. I don't think that theatre projects would be able to put people in full-time jobs, which is the purpose of the CE scheme. It is very difficult in the arts to go into full-time employment. I mean, a theatre group would be mainly made up of actors, and they spend a lot of time out of work."
They certainly do, as a recent meeting of Irish Actors Equity, their union, with an Oireachtas committee made clear. With only four actors out of the union's 1,500 members in full-time jobs, and with actors suffering the torments of an unsympathetic social-welfare system that has refused to recognise the periodic nature of their work, surely they figure among the socially disadvantaged groups to which FÁS is narrowing its focus. But where arts schemes are concerned, it seems, the most important issue is progression, or the apparent lack of it.
Yet the statistics to prove that arts-based community-employment candidates go on to varied and interesting work are readily available. In fact, they have to be reported to FÁS at the end of every scheme. Training people to be everything from box-office staff to gallery mediators, from community-arts workers to secretaries, from teachers to technical workers, venues such as Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and the Hawk's Well, in Sligo, report that up to three-quarters of them go on to work. Many other participants go on to further education.
So why the perception that theatre groups and other arts organisations are sapping Government resources while neglecting to provide anything but unemployable actors in return?
Among the theatre groups that avail of the community-employment scheme are Corcadorca, in Cork, and Beg Borrow & Steal, in Dublin. Both of them train actors, like any other participants, in a wide variety of roles. Margaret Biggs, director of Beg Borrow & Steal, says they then send them on "to work at anything from face-painting to drama-teaching to performance for corporate groups."
An even more efficient silencer of the notion that the schemes are geared towards creativity rather than clerical skills is the success of two Dublin-based community- employment schemes restricted to practising artists who need the time, the space and the support to develop projects in visual arts and film.
From those at the Fire Station studios and at Filmbase, respectively, have emerged artists such as Shane Cullen and Sean Hillen and film-makers such as Damien O'Donnell and Vinny Murphy, who says he would hardly have been able to complete Accelerator, his acclaimed feature, without the Filmbase scheme.
A current participant, Brendan Muldowney, has made three films through the scheme, one of which, Innocence, is gathering awards on the festival circuit.
ON THE Fire Station scheme, participants' progression includes completing major projects or bodies of work for sale, securing commissions or exhibitions and getting jobs in advertising, community arts, university lecturing and visual-arts criticism.
Rebecca Peart, who has been on the Fire Station scheme for two years, has used it to expand beyond painting. She has produced a collection of carborundum prints sold in commercial galleries in Dublin and London. "This is the way I survive," she says.
Hillen, who is well known for his unusual photomontages, says the scheme helps with getting off the dole, "breaking through to the professional world" - making contacts, taking commissions for advertising campaigns and public sculpture, in his case.
The evidence for progression to worthwhile employment seems undeniable, yet neither scheme may be renewed. The Filmbase scheme is "highly unlikely" to continue. What's to blame, many arts workers believe, is a peculiar blindness on the part of FÁS and the Government that renders anything but a certain type of job invisible.
"There is employment there," says Diane Hanrahan, manager of Corcadorca. "But people just don't see it, because it's not full-time work, or it's contract or it's periodic."
Where arts-based schemes are concerned, it seems, progress is not always quantifiable in business terms; participants may go on to work in the arts sector or elsewhere as freelances or as practising artists.
They may have work, and plenty of it, but they may not necessarily have jobs. And without jobs, supervisors explain, workers are less clearly part of the open labour market and, hence, less obviously progressing.
Progress and achievement should be highly visible to the Government - one piece of community-employment art hangs before the Taoiseach as he works. Yet the cuts continue. Luckily, Hillen can laugh at the irony. "They don't seem to have an idea of how to support the work, even though my pieces are in their offices," he says.
Others are slightly less tickled. The present situation certainly discourages a belief that the Government is interested in supporting the arts. Every community-employment scheme outside of the ring-fenced areas, from tourism to farming to environmental work, was affected by the cuts, but to allow the impact to be shouldered so significantly by an area already decimated by Arts Council cuts seems to point to short-sightedness or to total disregard by the Government.
Whichever it may be, the results have made for an arts community characterised by poverty and lack of opportunity. Artists know they have to be wary of making comparisons with those areas of very urgent, life-determining need ring-fenced by FÁS, but there is a sense that the agency would do well to look more closely at the sections of society that require support and development.
The participants in the Fire Station scheme, for example, are not exactly the FÁS target demographic - practising artists, many of them with degrees, they live on the dole by choice - but their supervisor Jackie Malcolm believes that, for choosing to pursue their art in a society that neglects to support them, to recognise their work as worthwhile, they deserve at least to perch atop the FÁS ring fence, if not inside.
As it attempts to move away from the arts, the success of its community-employment schemes suggests FÁS has done more than it realises for the sector. Its awareness of its responsibilities as a development agency has certainly been keener than that of the Arts Council. Far from accepting cuts without question, FÁS relentlessly argued with the Tánaiste, who was willing to accept far harsher reductions, until her Department found it didn't have to make quite such deep cuts.
"FÁS has allowed things to happen which don't happen normally," says Seamus Duggan, director of Filmbase. "These schemes gave people time and pointers. They said to people, we have taken you on because we believe you can make a career. They develop a work schedule, they get a belief in themselves. They feel professional. The scheme was vital because it recognised forms of work that contribute to society that were not being funded through any other source."
