Even when the State did begin to pay lip service to the arts 50 years ago with the establishment of the Arts Council in 1951, the best way to read its lips was to look at the money. In the first 20 years of its existence, the Arts Council received a grand total of £700,000 from the State. Even bearing in mind the effects of inflation, the limits to exchequer funding in what was still a poor country, and the fact that the most expensive cultural institution, the Abbey, was not then funded through the Arts Council, this was a miniscule sum.
Fifty years on, it is easy to believe that everything has been transformed. With £100 million allocated by the Government to the current Arts Plan, the Arts Council has received over a hundred times more funding from the State in its last three years than it did in its first 20. A statement such as the claim that "the arts sector is crucial to the well-being and development of society" is no longer the inflated rhetoric of a hopelessly marginalised minority of aesthetes. It is a quote from one of the central documents of the new, hard-edged, deal-making Ireland, the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. Both in terms of financial clout and of political glamour, the arts have moved into the mainstream.
Yet, profound as these changes are, much has stayed the same. In the current debate generated by S∅le de Valera's document, there are remarkably strong echoes of the arguments that raged around the proposals to establish the Arts Council 50 years ago.
These debates revolve around the question of what Irish culture really is.
In 1951, the then Taoiseach, John A. Costello, who made the Arts Council a personal project, was lobbied by the Gaelic League which demanded that all those appointed to the Arts Council should be and that "State funds would not be used to foster drama and literature in the language of another country" (English).
Likewise, in the Dail debate on the Arts Bill, the Fianna Fβil spokesman implied that Irish literature in English did not represent "the ordinary Irish people". He claimed that "real Irish art" was to be found in the period before the Norman invasion and that the task for modern artists was to emulate that period.
Fast forward to 2001 and the submissions from interested bodies generated by S∅le de Valera's discussion document. By far the largest group of such submissions comes from Comhaltas Ceolte≤ir∅ ╔ireann and its many local branches. In a report to the Department on the submissions received, the poet, Theo Dorgan, notes "the constant stream of references to 'non-indigenous arts forms' by Comhaltas supporters.
One contributor went so far as to suggest that a fiddle player who speaks Irish is more of a fiddle-player than one who doesn't, but in general this particular strain of argument rests on the contention that the traditional arts and the Irish language exist on a kind of essentialist plateau of national cultural identity". Likewise in the literary sphere, the Comhaltas submission glosses the term Irish literature as "literature in the Irish language", employing the term Anglo-Irish literature for Irish literature in the English language.
This return to the arguments of the 1950s may seem irrelevant to the diverse promiscuity of 21st century, post-Belfast Agreement, multicultural Ireland. But it highlights the dangers of interfering with the independence of the Arts Council in any new legislation. If you ask a politician to define Irish culture, you may get an answer that accords with the reality of an open, multi-faceted continually evolving weave of sounds, images, ideas and stories. Or you may get an ethnic fantasy in which some kind of supposedly static tradition is more real and true than anything else and art that does not celebrate Irish success is automatically unworthy of support.
The present Minister for the Arts, for example, is clearly of the view that we have inherited a fixed culture and that it is being eroded from the outside. In Boston last year, she spoke of how "directives and regulations agreed in Brussels can often seriously impinge on our identity, culture and traditions". Though she was unwilling to say what those directives might be or how they might be impinging on our culture, the underlying philosophy was clear enough: culture is a fixed asset that can be diminished by nasty outsiders. Such a defensive attitude could have real implications for the kind of funding decisions that a Department of Culture might make. More money for preserving the traditional, perhaps, and less for innovation inspired by European exemplars.
The Arts Council does need reform. The idea of a big, voluntary board attempting to micro-manage the funding of diverse institutions is inefficient and tedious. The relationship between appointed boards and full-time professional executives, indeed, needs to be re-examined in the whole arts sector so as to avoid the kind of disaster that unfolded in the Irish Museum of Modern Art recently or in the Abbey Theatre in the 1980s. A smaller council that acts like a corporate board, setting out broad strategy and holding executives to account, would work much more effectively and more transparently.
THE relationship between the Arts Council and the Minister for the Arts (a creature not envisaged at all in the existing legislation) does need to be clarified. One of the striking things about the submissions on S∅le de Valera's discussion document, for example, is that no one seems entirely sure whether or not the Minister's department currently has the right to make policy for the arts.
The distinguished former chairman of the Arts Council, Ciaran Benson, for example, suggests the 1973 Arts Act charges the Arts Council with formulating the State's policy for the arts. The Arts Council itself, however, seems to be of the view that it is the Department's responsibility to provide a policy framework.
What seems to be required is a system in which the Minister and the Department set out broad policy aims (access for the public, for example, or support for young, developing talent) and the Arts Council answers to a Dβil committee for its use of public funds to achieve these aims. Public accountability and the clear statement of overall aims are always good for any institution anywhere.
That, though, is a far cry from bringing the Arts Council and decisions on the funding of artists and cultural institutions under the direct control of the Minister.
On reflection, in any case, S∅le de Valera may be inclined to wonder whether the occasional glamour of being associated with the arts is not outweighed by the hassle of having to explain why State money is going to this or that piece of dirty denigration of this great nation.
The value to artists of keeping a distance from the State may be no more than the value to the State of keeping its distance from artists.
As the poet, Paula Meehan, puts it in her submission on the Minister's discussion document: No artist wants to feel they are a political's pet, and no politician in her or his right mind would want an artist as a pet".