The artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, Mr Ben Barnes, yesterday strongly defended Sebastian Barry's play Hinterland, which is partly based on the life of Charles Haughey.
He was unrepentant about the closeness of the play to the life of Mr Haughey.
"I hope," he said at the launch of the Abbey's new programme, "that the irony of watching the Irish print media leap to the defence of the Haugheys' privacy is not lost on you."
He argued that the Abbey was often criticised for not reflecting contemporary life. It was ironic, he said, that when it attempted "to grapple with contemporary social and political mores, it is inundated with outraged complaints that this is hardly what the sanctified founders had in mind for the hallowed stage of the Abbey Theatre.
"Much of the coverage that has taken the play off the arts pages and into the news pages has focused on the extent to which it is seen to reflect the life and times of a political figure from the recent past. This is fair enough, but it is not acceptable to us that journalists who know little or nothing about the theatre and rarely, if ever, come, are queuing up to tell us how bad a play it is.
"I want to point out," he went on, "that Sebastian Barry is an internationally recognised dramatist and that Max Stafford-Clark has a track record with directing new work which is unparalleled in the English-speaking theatre. Hinterland went through 11 drafts before it was presented to the public and while none of us claim that it is flawless or that there are (not) certain scenes that work better than others, it is, nevertheless, a play of serious moral intent which unflinchingly examines the capacity of power to corrupt. . ."
Speaking with far more spirit than has been usual during his tenure as artistic director, Mr Barnes claimed that the theatre's grant had, in real terms, gone down by over €1 million in the last two years.
He said the blame could lie either with the Arts Council, which had frozen the theatre's grant, or with the Government's inability to adopt the council's new arts plan.
This shortfall meant that they would implement a 10 per cent cut across all departments of the theatre, would "drastically" reduce the employment of international artists and would not replace staff or trainee directors. They could not honour a commitment to bring Catalonia's national theatre to Dublin; they could not tour nationally this year; and they would not renew their lease on their research and development facility, the Abbey Lab, in Temple Bar.
The Arts Council's director of public affairs, Ms Nessa O'Mahony, who was at the launch, had no comment, while drama adviser Ms Edith Reid Whyte said they were far from happy about the funding situation themselves.
Following a report in this newspaper on Monday which revealed that the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Ms de Valera, had still not responded officially to the Abbey board about her plans or preferences for the location or form of a new building for the theatre, Mr Barnes said "the time for prevarication is well and truly over".