The resignation last weekend of the Arts Council's director took many bysurprise. She has much support, writes Belinda McKeon

'We discussed it for hours and hours. We looked at it to see what would work from it and what would not work and what things could we keep. But then we thought, why do we hold onto this? We could work with the basics. But the idea doesn't work. The plan is out of date already."

Olive Braiden, the chairwoman of the Arts Council, is describing how events unfolded on Thursday morning last week, at the council's plenary meeting. On the table for discussion was the third arts plan, launched in 2002 by the then minister for arts, Síle de Valera, and set to run until 2006. By Thursday evening it was announced that the plan was to be "set aside" as soon as the council had "completed an intensive examination of its current priorities and goals". The council felt assured of its rationale in dispensing with the plan; as Braiden reiterated to The Irish Times the next day: "Why work to a plan that isn't working?"

But by the next day, of course, she had received her answer, or at least one answer that was difficult to ignore. You work to the plan, the council discovered, because that is the only way to continue working with the council's director. On Friday afternoon, in a statement that came as a bombshell to most people, including Braiden and other members of the council, Patricia Quinn, director of the Arts Council since 1996, announced her resignation. It was a matter of honour, her letter to the council made clear; in circumstances "where the Council's precipitate action overturns Government policy and is contrary to the considered advice of its own executive" she was, she felt, obliged to step down.

A week on, with the benefit of hindsight, Quinn's decision appears in a less surprising light. Quinn was intimately involved with the creation of the arts plan, with the outlook behind it and with the task of implementing it over five years. By setting aside the plan - or, to put it less discreetly but no less candidly, by terminating it - the council was, at the very least, downgrading the principles on which it was based. Those principles were characterised by the drive towards strategisation and management that had been Quinn's calling card throughout her career.

The council may have discussed its move for hours and hours, but Quinn had spent years working towards her vision of a professional, policy-led arts sector, its development overseen by a council that was much more than just a funding body. And the council's decision is now facing criticism, from diverse sources, for acting too rashly.

Colm O'Briain, himself a former director of the council, sees the decision as a regressive step. "So much work and energy and effort and experience went into delivering the plan in the first place and getting political support behind the idea of a planned approach," he says. "To have it now dispensed with seems to me highly problematic. I think only a structured approach to the arts can generate a confidence that will deliver the level of public funding."

The plan was nothing if not structured. It was a blueprint of Quinn's vision of the Arts Council as a development agency, and it was one that she expected to see endure, in some form, in the tenure of the new council. The plunge in funding that hit the council just months after it adopted the plan was a setback: despite having a spending target of €53.7 million for 2003, the council was granted only €44 million, an 8 per cent cut on the previous year, in a belt-tightening budget. So, too, was the council's decision, in 2003, to suspend the multi-annual funding agreements to arts organisations, which comprised the plan's backbone. But the timescale could be changed, the objectives of the plan rewritten to come in line with the changed financial situation; this was the direction in which meetings seemed to be moving last month between members of the executive and a council subcommittee set up to review the plan.

But everything changed at the plenary meeting. On the surface it is not difficult to understand why; the third arts plan, with its developmental ethos, discomfited many in the arts, including, as Braiden points out, some of the artists and leaders of arts organisations who ended up on the new council. Many perceived the way the previous council promulgated the plan as excessively directional, setting targets for funding without sufficient consultation from the sector, stressing the need to look to sources other than the Arts Council for funds and cloaked, above all, in what has been described as "MBA language" that was difficult to understand. "It was beautifully written," says one insider, "and aspirational. But there was no tangibility to it; it was too amorphous. It could have been fitted on to anything."

The council's decision to set the plan aside, then, was driven by an awareness that it did not sufficiently serve the needs of artists. Apart from the problem of the vanished multi-annual funding, there was a sense that artists did not have "ownership" of the plan, that it reflected the needs of the Arts Council rather than the needs of the arts.

As a chairwoman of significant experience, Braiden will be well versed in the impossibility of pleasing all of the people all of the time; no matter how far backwards a board may bend to please its clients, some of them will still not be satisfied. It may be tempting, then, to interpret the grumbles with which the shelving of the arts plan has been greeted by some as merely that: indications of what an ungrateful lot the council is dealing with. It may well be that the sector is ungrateful and difficult to please; that much will become clear once the council begins to address its needs in the open, communicative way Braiden has promised. But the sector's objections to and concerns about the decision warrant the council's serious consideration. Because what the objections and concerns make clear is that the council has not even begun the crucial task of communication, of addressing the sector's needs. And the uncertain situation in which the end of the arts plan leaves the executive of the council - an executive freshly restructured to facilitate the developmental vision of that plan - poses an even greater threat to communications between council, executive and clients.

The workings of the executive may have confused many in the sector, but confusion now surrounds its very purpose. "Patricia Quinn was the one whose vision the new structure represents," says O'Briain. "And if she is not there to deliver on it I think they will have some administrative difficulties." As both an artist and director of an arts organisation, Declan Gorman of Upstate Theatre Company represents a neat cross section of the clientele to whom the council wishes to listen more closely. But he is already unhappy with the nature and level of communication from the council and doubts that its setting aside was what the sector wanted. "There were certainly murmurs abroad," he says, "but there was no formal process of asking the sector for its views prior to the overturning of this. I would be worried that they were responding to anecdotal complaints, and that is all very well, but if that is to be the benchmark for action in the future that is worrying. Because short of picking up the phone and ringing someone in the Arts Council to let them know what I am worried about, how is the Arts Council going to know?"

Gorman's stance is precisely what the council would prefer not to hear; although he had problems with the language of the plan, he feels that, overall, it was "legible and transparent", that arts organisations could "grow accustomed to it, to making their work compatible with its aims and objectives". The plan was flexible, he says, and yielded the scope for good creative work.

Willie White, artistic director of Project Arts Centre in Dublin, cannot agree. "No," he says when asked if he will miss the plan. "Nobody could argue with its objectives, but the implementation of those objectives was an issue." But White and Gorman agree that the ditching of the plan without something definite to replace it is problematic. This was, in fact, a reason Quinn gave for her departure: a council that set aside her plan was bad enough, but one that failed to provide a viable alternative, or any alternative, could not be endured. Gorman is inclined to agree. "I don't know what the other game in town is now," he says. "I don't know what I am going to have to work to next."

Unpopular as the plan may be, some kind of structure is necessary if the council is to serve the community. Gorman sees the risk as that of a return to the scenario of the 1980s and 1990s, "when whoever shouted loudest got most". Being on the board of the Arts Council is not a full-time job, and the first two months of the council's tenure were well occupied with securing an increase in funding. That said, the council must move quickly to provide some kind of structure, some document or set of criteria for funding; it is now March, and before long arts organisations will need to approach their application for next year's funding.

The council, in fact, has much to clarify if it wants to defend itself against accusations of rashness. How much can an examination of "current priorities and goals" take? Should this not have been completed before the setting aside of the arts plan? Has the arts sector been consulted in this process - and, if so, how and according to what criteria? Will the priorities and goals be published and will there be an opportunity for consultation on such a publication? The challenge facing the council is to be thorough in meeting the expectations of the sector in all of these regards, without taking too long to do so; without creating another version of the waiting game that strains the relationship between the council and the sector every December, as the funding decisions are prepared.

The council will need, also, to make clear where it stands on strategic planning. With no multi-annual funding, will the council manage to provide criteria, and structures, for funding that take the long view, that facilitate artistic vision and planning for projects of two years or longer? There is, too, another reason why the council needs to show its hand; for some, including Declan McGonagle, director of City Arts Centre, the council's abandonment of the arts plan represents not an overturning of government policy but a worrying alignment with it. "At the moment in Ireland there is a certain kind of consumerism, or short-termism, abroad," says McGonagle. "I would have liked to see the Arts Council stand over the principles of strategic, long-term thinking and then make their case to the Government. . . . There is a very strong sense that the Government is not going to fund strategic thinking. It looks to me as if the council simply swallowed that."

Last summer, as the Arts Act went through the Dáil, debate raged about whether, in allowing the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism to give directives on policy, it granted the Government undue power over the council. The sort of influence McGonagle sees may not be precisely what the critics of the Arts Act have in mind; what he alleges is policy by assimilation rather than by direction. But the doubt is there, and only the structured expression of its own policies will give the council a credibility all its own.