The resignation of Patricia Quinn as director of the Arts Council was a start. The next step should be the council's dissolution, and the summary execution of all council members who protest.
For the arts and government are in philosophical antithesis. Allowing politicians anywhere near the arts is madness; and letting the fingers of arts managers anywhere near the public purse is as responsible as introducing a nymphomaniac into a locker room.
How did the "arts" manage to secure such an extraordinary relationship with government? There is no point of overlap: none whatever. The Government's duty is to raise taxes, administer the State, educate and protect its citizens. Yet somewhere, somehow, the middle-class arts shimmered alongside government, and managed to pilfer the Exchequer. Incredibly, there is even a Government-sponsored "arts" body to promote rock bands.
What justification can there possibly be for this nonsense? If people want art, or even rock music, why shouldn't they pay for it themselves? Bizarrely, the form of expression we most often associate with the term "art" - painting - is in its most vibrant form wholly commercial. The great Suzanne Macdougald runs her Solomon Gallery without any State aid. So why should theatre, opera, dance and symphonic music be subsidised by taxpayers who'll never get near any of the events they make possible? Only a huge intellectual snobbery among artists and a crushing sense of cultural inferiority amongst politicians could have created this absurd state of affairs. The apogee - or the nadir: when things are truly preposterous, opposites come to mean the same - of this inversion of logic is represented by the tragic travesty that is the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
This is the only major 17th-century building in Ireland. It cost over £20 million in 1980 to restore it to its magnificent greatness, and under the wise and genial guidance of Tony
Ó Dalaigh it became a major place of resort for Dubliners. Then, at a click of Charles Haughey's taoiseachly fingers, guided by his artistic adviser Anthony Cronin, it was turned into a hanging space for modern art. Thus was much of the glorious restoration undone; expensively refurbished door opes were walled in, and further millions of pounds were squandered in vandalising a once noble building.
This is what happens when the juggernaut of massive political ego, with access to unlimited public finances, is free to indulge pet obsessions - in this case, the vile disorder that goes by the term "modern art". Yet any warehouse could have provided hanging space for modern art: to have made the Royal Hospital Kilmainham house the grisly horrors that have been polluting its walls for the past decade or more is akin to turning Chartres Cathedral into an ice-skating rink.
No such commercial decision would ever have been arrived at - or if it had, the managing director's head would be on the block at the next shareholders' a.g.m. Only in that polluted place where politician meets "artist" would such madness occur.
It's not just the RHK. Why, for example, should the Irish taxpayer give a single penny to the Wexford Opera Festival? The people who attend are invariably well to do, and Irish accents are remarkably rare there. Indeed, Wexford is now effectively part of the English opera circuit. What justification can there possibly be for working-class taxpayers in Ireland subsidising the enjoyment of rich natives and foreigners? Where's the logic? Where's the morality? Well, the logic and the morality are usually explained in Urdu or Parsee, and the argument boils down to this: that a civilised society minds its artists, as Gaelic chieftains once did. That's right, they did; but they personally paid for those artists out of their own pockets. For the modern State - a quite different concept from a chieftain - to be subsidising certain pastimes with taxpayers' money, but not others, merely corrupts the artistic market place.
Because the arts have their price, as the great medieval patrons of the arts - the churches and princes - realised. And the principles of such patronage are sound. If modern patrons want rubbish - and some do, as Charles Saatchi has shown - then certain artists, such as Damien Hirst, will always oblige.
But the rigour of the artistic market-place should provide both the discipline and the finance for artists and their art. That was the market place, uncontaminated by public money, in which Shakespeare, Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde survived and prospered.
Market forces found genius and allowed it to flourish, just as market forces today discovered David Mamet, Sam Mendez, Alan Ball and so many others.
Without the expectations of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach might have indulged his secret appetite for atonalism, and produced a concerto for a carving knife, a piece of chalk and a dog. Without Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo could well have yielded to his private desire to smear chicken entrails on the canvas and call it "The Last Supper". An end to arts councils, to arts plans, to arts subsidies by the State. If people want Wexford Opera or theatre in Dublin, then let them, or corporate sponsors, pay for it. I accept there are sound arguments for giving corporations tax-breaks - as in the US - for donations to the arts. This keeps the State out of the picture, into which it should never have been allowed to creep, while ensuring that the arts sector remains responsive to popular taste and expectations. As for the Arts Council, I expect letters of resignation from its members, with abject expressions of contrition, on my desk by noon today.