See there, that man Ollie Jennings with the table and tin on High Street. Selling raffle tickets at €5 a piece. Isn't he former Mr Galway Arts Festival on a bicycle, one-time ministerial nominee to the Arts Council, now band manager on an international stage? Yet there he is, back on the margins again as organiser of Project '06.
"And I've made one of the biggest errors of judgment of my entire career," Jennings says, just several weeks before the opening of the complementary event. "When we began talking about this late last year, I thought it might take a little while but we would all be working together eventually. I genuinely thought that this would have all been sorted by now."
That it hasn't - that Galway Arts Festival and Project '06 are running two distinctly separate programmes over a July fortnight - is not something that Jennings says he takes any great pleasure in. His band, the Saw Doctors, have been touring Scotland, he always wanted to visit the Orkneys, and now he is going to miss it.
He's raised almost €10,000 in his raffle to fund the project's carnival parade - taking place the day before the festival's Macnas event - and has experienced spontaneous generosity from strangers. However, he has also been shaken by hurtful rows in public places with close friends.
When the project was initiated, there was a sense of some old scores being settled - a charge that Jennings, and Project '06 partners Paraic Breathnach and Michael Diskin dismiss. At a meeting last February attended by more than 300 people in the Great Southern Hotel on Eyre Square, there were some mixed messages, but also a healthy debate, which the Galway Arts Festival opted out of - sending a statement instead that wished the initiative well.
At that meeting, Diskin, manager of the Town Hall Theatre, said the main aim of Project '06 was to "let every artist put on a show", while admitting that he had stopped directing artists to the arts festival a few years ago. "We want to meet you and to talk to you and I can't understand how this can be portrayed in anything but a positive light," Diskin said. "We're not protesting, we're showing what can be achieved."
Breathnach, Macnas founder, and Jennings, father to the original arts festival, were more forthright. The festival was in receipt of considerable State funding and "if it had any cop, it would have organised this meeting", Breathnach said. The arts festival and the Druid Theatre were "like two cuckoos in a nest, soaking up money and taking up venues" and there would be "no more Druids, Macnases, Little Johns and Saw Doctors" unless young aspiring artists were supported, he added.
Some 90 per cent of what the arts festival did was "great", Jennings said, but a request for a meeting with it late last year had not been acceded to and it was time for the festival board to "come down off its high horse" he said. Other speakers, such as Little John Nee, articulated concerns that may have related more to a relentlessly changing city than to the artistic content of a valued constant.
IT TOOK FORMER minister for arts Michael D Higgins to identify the real issue. Gently counselling against visiting "a number of old chestnuts", Higgins said he believed it was both "possible and necessary to achieve excellence" - as in booking international acts - and to involve local artists. It would be "very wrong" to present this initiative as a "confrontation between the new, organised and professional and the founders", and yet the meeting should be a "wake-up call for respect and creativity in all its forms", he said.
Higgins raised the wider issue of public space and the "loss of the street" in cities across Europe. One now required "a €6 million insurance policy" to exercise one's right to be in the street, he said. "We're told that we're the richest people in Europe, if not the world, and yet we're a city that doesn't own a tent," he said.
And so, for a little while, it became the battle to bring back that large canvas structure, pitched in the Fisheries Field on the banks of the Corrib, which had been so symbolic of the Galway Arts Festival for many years. It appeared to be round one to Project '06 when a series of "Big Top" gigs - involving David Gray, Bell X1, Simple Minds, UB40 and others - was advertised in early arts festival publicity. New festival artistic director Paul Fahy had also secured a plethora of street events for his first programme.
The arts festival board did say it would talk to a Project '06 delegation, and a date was set for early May. "The city manager, Joe McGrath, had offered to chair it, but the arts festival wouldn't agree to that or to an agenda," Jennings says. "The body language indicated that there was no real willingness for dialogue. It was one of the most awful meetings I have been at in 30 years in Galway, reminiscent of when I was in boarding school."
By that stage, Project '06 had already published its own agenda anyway in its own programme, which it produced with much voluntary effort in time for the official arts festival programme launch. "The 150-plus events included in Project '06 are a practical demonstration of the quantity and quality of Galway groups that are not currently included in the festival," the programme stated.
"The artists involved feel that they should have a fair chance to be part of Galway's main celebration of the arts. In our view, a fringe festival would simply compound the marginalisation of locally based artists, which is at the root of the problem." As Breathnach had put it so bluntly at the February meeting, "I'm too old to be part of a fringe."
A LIST OF issues on the programme cover identifies lack of communication and engagement by the festival, a failure to include and promote Galway acts, a perceived lack of accessibility, and insufficient attention given to community and youth activities. Jennings says he is aware of accusations that his sole motivation is in ensuring that his band, the Saw Doctors, are booked for the festival every year. "Some years we were in, some years we weren't, it is no big issue and it isn't personality-based."
Galway Arts Festival has said it welcomes the event, but points out the major differences, including that Project '06 is "not a directed or programmed festival, is open to all arts groups and owned by whoever wants to participate in it", whereas Galway Arts Festival has always been a curated festival with a selection process. They are two very different types of events, it stresses.
According to Jennings, the Project '06 programme is "organic" in that participants had to organise their own venues. "No one is getting any money out of this," he says. The box office is in the Town Hall, and Jennings concedes that its manager did "come under pressure" in the early stages. "The arts festival wrote to Galway City Council and complained about one of our meetings being held there in a local authority-owned venue."
Project '06 also received a boost from officialdom in the form of a €10,000 Arts Council small festivals grant - not insubstantial, considering that established events such as Roundstone and Tuam get somewhat less. "However, we have had a deliberate policy in relation to funding, in that we have not competed for any of the arts festival sources," Jennings says.
He is adamant that there won't be a Project '07 - as had been stated from the outset. Project '06 has proposed that a small working group be established with a neutral chair to evaluate the development of both events, examine the issues raised, and draw up a series of proposals by September.
Jennings is still cautiously optimistic. "I don't think we've raised false expectations, and there is a lot of enthusiasm, energy and talent out there. The problem is that I've discovered that there is a new establishment in town."
