It was the year of the millennium. Ireland was booming and fashionable. Bill Clinton was still in the White House. The peace process was holding steady. So when the Kennedy Centre in Washington hosted a festival of Irish culture, inspired by Jean Kennedy-Smith and funded by the Irish and US governments, the mood was meant to be celebratory. The idea was to show what art could do for the country's image abroad, how it could give immediate substance to all the talk of a vibrant, creative place.
The showpiece of the festival was a new play by Marina Carr, presented by the internationally renowned Druid Theatre Company and directed by the much-feted Garry Hynes. The opening night audience of the great and good was buzzing with anticipation.
By the time the interval came, though, it was sitting in shocked silence. Instead of the expected celebration of the new cool Ireland, it was getting a nightmarish vision of an imploding culture. Carr's play, On Raftery's Hill, has a father whose wife is really his daughter, a son who lives in the cow shed, another daughter who is being prepared for incestuous enslavement.
It was the extreme opposite of the image any State would want to present to outsiders, especially in a semi-official showcase in the centre of world power. It was the kind of thing that would haunt the uneasy dreams of executives from Bord Fβilte and the IDA for years to come.
Yet it was also, in its way, an extraordinary tribute to the Irish cultural establishment. What better example of artistic freedom in action could there be than a State-funded theatre company presenting at a State-funded festival the very last play that the State would want to promote abroad? That this can happen in what used to be one of the Western world's most censorious societies comes down to an institution that is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Arts Council. For all the criticism and controversy the council has generated since its inception in 1951, few could deny it has changed the nature of the arts in Ireland beyond recognition.
Without the sometimes meagre and often inadequate funds the council sent their way, it is inconceivable that a small group of friends in Galway, a city that had never had a professional theatre in its history, could have developed into an internationally acclaimed company such as Druid. Without the sometimes grudging official recognition that the council embodies, it is hard to see how the relentless State suspicion of the arts that lasted well into the 1960s could have been so radically transformed that the State is now desperate to identify itself with artistic success.
And without the arms-length relationship of the Arts Council to the governments that fund it, it is impossible to imagine events such as last year's Washington festival, where Irish artists felt free to challenge the orthodoxy of the State while also benefiting from its largesse.
And yet, even as it celebrates its own survival and the phenomenal growth of both its budget and its number of clients, the Arts Council finds itself at a moment of deep uncertainty.
On the one hand, its own internal structures have come under increasing strain. The present council, for example, has had to cope with the resignations of its original chairman, Brian Farrell, and prominent members such as U2 manager Paul McGuinness and Jane Gogan. It has also experienced periods of considerable unrest among its full-time staff. It seems clear that the structures that were appropriate to a small, cash-starved operation in the 1970s may not work for a 21st century organisation spending about £35 million a year.
On the other hand, the very success of the Arts Council in securing such massive increases in State funding means that the arts have become a good news story. That, in turn, means politicians are increasingly anxious to be associated with the largesse that flows though it.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Arts Council only ever hit the headlines when it was turning down a grant application or pulling out of an operation it could no longer afford, politicians were happy enough to be able to say: "Don't blame us. The Arts Council is an independent body." Now, when the arts have become glamorous and spanking new arts centres are opening around the country, the temptation to claim the credit is increasingly irresistible.
To be fair to the politicians, moreover, there are real issues of democratic accountability when large amounts of public money are being spent. It is one thing to leave a relatively obscure institution to get on with the job of divvying up a pitiful pittance among a multitude of half-starved artists. It is quite another to funnel very significant amounts of public funds through a body that most of the public knows very little about.
Late last year, therefore, the Minister for the Arts, S∅le de Valera, issued a discussion document called "Towards a New Framework for the Arts". It raises the question of whether the "arm's length" approach of the previous Arts Acts of 1951 and 1973, which devolves the making of policy to an independent Arts Council, rather than to a political ministry, has had its day.
The document strongly hints at the Minister's disposition to bring arts policy under her own wing: "There is broad acceptance in the arts community and among all key arts development agencies that the arm's length principle has been appropriate to the arts environment in Ireland. There have, however, been concerns expressed on issues such as accountability and transparency and these issues should be considered in the review of the arts legislation." The report adds that the Council of Europe has remarked that there are "dangers" attendant on the arm's-length approach, "including the withdrawal of cultural decision-making from genuine public view or accountability and a potential neglect by government of a sector which it does not directly control". It's that little word "control" that, throughout the 20th century, set alarm bells ringing.
In Denis Johnston's satiric play, The Old Lady Says No!, written in 1926, the hero encounters the artistic establishment of the new Free State at a south Dublin soirΘe. There's the "well known dramatist" Seamus O' Cooney, a caricature of Sean O'Casey muttering to himself about There's O'Mooney the "rising portrait painter" and O'Rooney "the famous novelist". And there is the host of the gathering, the Minister for Arts and Crafts, given to such pronouncements as "until we have Talent and Art in this country, we have no National Dignity". Johnston uses this scene to suggest the political neutering of the arts by the State's sly manipulation. As the Minister puts it: "a young fellow comes along to me and he says, Now look, Liam, here's some art I'm after doing... It might be a book, you see, or a drawing, or even a poem... and can you do anything for me, he says? Well, with that, I do... if he deserves it, mind you, only if he deserves it, under Section 15 of the Deserving Artists (Support) Act, number 65 of 1926. And there's no favouritism at all." such as: "The State supports the Artist. And the Artist supports the State. Very satisfactory for everybody and no favouritism at all." Finally the Minister tips a wink to the audience: "And of course then, you see, it helps us to keep an eye on the sort of stuff that's turned out, you understand."
What Johnston was sending up here was a kind of collusion that would become a central theme of the cultural politics of the 20th century. Under fascism and communism, that collusion would be open and compulsory. In the democracies, it would be more along the lines of the minister's cute strategy: hook them in with the promise of a grant, reward those who serve the State and keep an eye on those who don't.
The strange thing about Johnston's satire, however, is that it is entirely misplaced. The new State had no Minister for Arts and Crafts and wouldn't feel the need for one until 1993, when Michael D. Higgins became its first Minister for the Arts and Culture. For its first few decades, it didn't bother with subtle policies of cultivating favoured artists.
Its arts policy essentially consisted of two complementary approaches: censorship and exile. Where it was not formally banned, most serious literature was simply rejected by the semi-official cultural institutions such as the Abbey Theatre and Radio ╔ireann. Ironically, the first high-profile victim of this informal policy of deliberate neglect was The Old Lady Says No! itself, turned down by the Abbey for fear that it might alienate an increasingly conservative audience.