The Government has committed itself to increasing Arts Council funding from its current level of £28 million to £37.5 million in 2001. This is the level of funding which the council's new three-year plan for the arts requires.
The Minister for the Arts, Ms Sile de Valera, announced yesterday at the launch of the new plan that the Government had agreed to allocate the funding to implement the plan in full.
The plan makes a strong case for this increase in funding. It shows how low public funding of the arts is, at £12.36 per person, compared with £17.32 in Northern Ireland, £24.23 in England and £62.14 in Sweden. It argues that the huge increase in arts activity stimulated by the first arts plan, which was commissioned from the council by the then minister, Mr Michael D. Higgins, and which resulted in a doubling of the council's funding, now means that more resources are urgently required.
The new proposals call for the transformation of the Arts Council from a funding body into a "development agency". The council would, it says, move from making annual funding awards to multi-annual funding aimed at reaching particular developmental goals for the arts.
Asked if this might not give it too much of a leadership role in the arts, compared with artists, the director of the Arts Council, Ms Patricia Quinn, said: "The fact is we have such a role to play in the livelihood of so many organisations that we are already intervening.
"What we want is to be more sensitive to the effects of those interventions and for them to have the effects we want them to have, rather than effects we don't want them to have."
In order to take on this "developmental" role, the plan says that the Arts Council structure should be reviewed and a programme of staff training undertaken. A case will also be made to the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, it says, for an increase in the Arts Council's staff. It has 32 permanent staff members. (The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has 40 staff members.) The most radical proposal is that funding decisions for different sectors of the arts will no longer be separate. Instead funding will be allocated for the specific development needs of the arts in general.
The Arts Council will also attempt to strengthen the co-operation between arts organisations to maximise their effectiveness.
In line with its new role as a "development agency", the council will seek to build international audiences for Irish art. While most European countries have a well-resourced agency which actively looks after the export of its art, Ireland has up to now relied on the badly resourced Cultural Relations Committee. Another traditional weakness of the arts in Ireland is their low level of priority with local government. According to the plan local government support for the arts in Ireland accounts for just 15 per cent of arts funding, whereas in other European countries it often stands at 50 per cent.
The council envisages, in the context of the increased devolution which local authority restructuring has caused, working with local authorities to maximise support for the arts.
The peripheral place of the arts in the education system was a theme articulated strongly at the council's consultative meetings before the publication of the plan. The response to this is a proposal to form a committee, with the Department of Education and the Department of Arts, to bring the arts to the centre of the educational process.
The proposals are couched in the language of management planning. Because it articulates a new "developmental" working process, it has relatively few concrete proposals related to specific events.
However, to stimulate awareness of contemporary art music, it is proposed that funding be introduced to a professional ensemble which will specialise in contemporary music. The plan commits the council to researching the potential for a major contemporary art exhibition in Ireland "of international scale and scope" and to completing a feasibility study for government on the potential for a major show of Irish contemporary art to tour to international venues.
The focus on architecture is a relatively new departure for the council. It undertakes to prepare a submission to the Department of the Environment proposing amendments to the planning legislation so that aesthetic arguments can be better taken into account.
It also proposes the setting up of a major biennial award to allow a young Irish architect to be employed in a distinguished international practice, with a subsequent commission in Ireland.
The Arts Council also plans to celebrate itself, during the 50th anniversary next year of the Arts Act which set it up. It will run a major programme of "recognition and celebration of the arts and their contribution to Irish life".