YOU might have seen me one morning last week doing something that Nora Joyce used to do to pass the days in Paris, when her husband was at home in the hotel writing Finnegans Wake, She used to go to music shops and listen on gramophones to romantic music. I was in the HMV shop, standing in the corner with the headphones on, having a free listen to Andrea Bocelli and Sara Brightman singing Time to Say Goodbye.
You do of course know that Bocelli's album Romanza has just been a smash hit in Ireland, "going gold" after three weeks, and selling many, many thousands of copies. And why wouldn't it? The duet which has been selling it is the very last word in lush accompaniment and swelling manly voice. It's gorgeous. He's gorgeous. And he's blind. He sings this ballad as if he means it with all his heart, and that's why it speaks to so many people.
They think of it as art. When people come into the HMV shop they go straight past rock and pop to the classical section to ask for it. Is that what Sile de Valera would do? What does Sile de Valera think is art?
This is one of the more interesting questions about the new administration. In departments like defence, or social welfare, or transport, the inner convictions of the minister of the moment may not matter much.
But as we learned from Michael D. Higgins, what an arts minister personally believes about art and artists, and more particularly about art and the people, and what government should do about that relationship, is what shapes an arts ministry. You can't do it without convictions. But conviction isn't easily reached in this area. And if she is confused about these great questions, Site de Valera can be forgiven. Ireland is confused.
TAKE the interesting case of Temple Bar. The discussion about it, so far, has seemed to be about public order - about whether there are too many pubs. Too many pubs from whose point of view? I've often asked myself. Too many pubs compared to what urban ideal?
After all, in half the towns of Ireland every second premises is a pub and no one complains. In Killarney, which is a total success in its own terms, you'd never hear anyone saying there are too many pubs. The residents of Temple Bar don't, of course, have the stake in the commercial success of the place that the residents of Killarney have. They're not making a living there.
But even apart from that, Temple Bar is meant to be architecturally distinguished, and to function as an arts quartier. Certainly, every time the number of pubs is mentioned the number of art places is put forward as some kind of counter argument. But what do the people who come into the pubs think is art?
Is there anything arty in Temple Bar for the many thousands of people who consider that Andrea Bocelli singing Time to Say Goodbye is art? Has it come down to entertainment being the province of the profit making entrepreneur and art being the responsibility of the taxpayer?
Sile de Valera is going to have to form her own views on these matters. The cultural side of Temple Bar will always need subsidy. And, presumably, what it presents as subsidy worthy will keep changing. I wonder whether, when she was opposition spokesperson and relatively anonymous, she did what I did recently - go around the place, and see what it has to offer the visitor, in return for the State investment in it.
I went to the Ark, the "Cultural Centre for Children". I didn't have any children to hand, and it was £2 in to see the building, so I didn't go in. I went to Arthouse. This is a "multimedia centre for the arts". There wasn't exactly anything to see. The cafe is very pleasant and there were people doing things on computers in it. I went to the Temple Bar Gallery. Interesting stuff. I've often been there. It is the art gallery in town one is least shy about walking into.
I went to the Gallery of Photography and liked the exhibit but didn't like the unfriendly building. I went to the Music Centre. Nice coffee. Phil Collins and The Corrs are on the jukebox, so it can't be only fashionable young ones in wisps of black who patronise the place. I went to Designyard. Lovely things. Expensive. I went to the Irish Film Centre. Wonderful absence of concrete. You can have a snack or a drink. Handy toilets, too.
THE Film Centre was the most like something you'd get in Killarney. That is, there were a lot of people there and they seemed happy. They seemed at ease.
Everyone knows how to go to the pictures. For the rest, the cultural centres in Temple Bar struck me as being practitioner oriented rather than consumer oriented. Being in the centre city, they're cheek by jowl with high turnover pubs and restaurants. But they're not just not appealing to the same consumers. They're not appealing to consumers at all.
Temple Bar is the workplace and play space of many Irish people - mainly young who engage in mainly contemporary arts practices. Fair enough. They are most valuable people. But so are all the others whose taxes keep it going, who are likely to admire the Three Tenors and Andrea Bocelli in music and John B. Keane in drama and Angela's Ashes in literature and who've made the Osborne The Cottage Garden the bestselling print in the National Gallery. Those are not high art choices.
The critics don't bother about them, even though they matter very much indeed to the people who make them. Temple Bar is moving more and more into high quality entertainment, and into areas of taste and skill food, games - which in the end have implications for the general level of cultivation in a society. But, in general, ordinary Irish people know that they're in some way excluded from art, and they do not walk around Temple Bar as confidently as they walk around Killarney.
If I were Site de Valera that's what I would concentrate on making links between the arts practising minority and the larger audience. A government arts policy can't make artists happen. It can make the conditions for the production of art more propitious, and under Michael D. a lot of that was done. But the gap is getting wider between artist and nonartist.
The effort has been going into the individual artist, not into the cultivation of the latent artistry of the many. And the arts are there, inside everyone. I met a wonderful young woman, for instance, in the Temple Bar Original Print Gallery. She's an assistant there. She got the job through FAS. She was a hairdresser now she knows all about printmaking and she has done an art history course and she is an enthusiast for the prints she shows.
With any luck, she'll get a proper job in the arts sector - she is on just a year's placement. But, in any case, she is transformed. That is what's possible. That's the area where Sile de Valera might make a mark. If she wants to make a mark. Bocelli, after all, is great for four minutes. But four minutes isn't enough.