It's election time and the Government is putting its funding of the arts back centre-stage. Beware, counsels Michael Dervan, their patronage can't be trusted
The Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue, yesterday launched Fianna Fáil's arts manifesto, Next Steps for the Arts. The Taoiseach was among the listeners as he spun out the figures. €216 million for arts and cultural projects this year; €1.13 billion provided for in the National Development Plan 2007-2013.
The Minister welcomed the Arts Council's new Arts & Education Report, and said: "I look forward to implementing the findings back in government."
Talk is cheap. The issue is this. Can Fianna Fáil be trusted to deliver what the party promises in the arts? O'Donoghue has had a generally easy ride. It's not difficult for him to point to achievements.
A new Arts Act, long overdue, was passed in 2003. Funding to the Arts Council has increased. Culture Ireland has been set up to promote Irish arts abroad. Capital funding projects have ensured that new arts centres and venues continue to spring up around the State.
The long-delayed Cork School of Music will open this year. A new opera house is being built in Wexford and a new National Theatre and National Concert Hall are on the way. Many of these were featured in the Programme for Government Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats agreed in 2002.
But this year the artist Robert Ballagh declared: "Most Irish politicians couldn't give a fart in their brown corduroy trousers for any form of art whatsoever." He had to go to the High Court last year to force legislation to implement an EU directive on royalty payments to artists whose works are resold.
Two recent letters to this newspaper drew attention to the demise of artistic and cultural venues in Dublin's city centre (Jimmy Burns, May 14th), and the still appalling state of music education in Ireland (Dr Evelyn Grant of the Forum for Music in Ireland, May 11th).
Then there's the issue of non-recoupable VAT on the fees of non-resident artists performing in Ireland. This is small beer for the exchequer, but, given the size of arts budgets, a potentially crippling burden for many organisations.
Report after report has quantified the low earnings of workers - creators and performers alike - in the arts sector. Creative artists fortunate enough to have been elected to Aosdána may qualify for a Cnuas, an annual stipend valued at €12,180. This is means-tested to exclude anyone already earning one-and-a-half times that amount.
Surely it is a matter of shame rather than national pride that more than half the members of our artistic elite actually qualify for it? Can there possibly be a greater criticism of public policy in the arts than this bald fact? Then there's the reported diminishing engagement with the arts, documented in last year's Arts Council research document, The Public and the Arts, at a time when access is perceived as having improved. If the council looked a little more closely at its treatment by the Government it might find a hint or two.
The 2002 Programme for Government declared: "We will support the implementation of the Third Arts Plan [ and] work to ensure that the council has the appropriate professional staffing structures."
The plan envisaged that funding for the Arts Council would rise from €47.9 million to €79.9 million, and amount to €314 million over the period.
The Government actually cut funding in 2003, leaving the council €10 million short. The council later set the Arts Plan aside, causing its director Patricia Quinn to resign. And year after year the Minister for Finance's budget allocations continued to miss the plan's modest targets. Even when special supplementary allocations are taken into account, including those for the Abbey Theatre and the traditional arts, by the end of 2006 the shortfall in Arts Council funding from the promises of 2002 still amounted to more than €19 million. The Arts Council, to its shame, appears to have accepted the turnaround without a peep.
This is not the only major arts funding loss. The 2002 Programme for Government promised "the early establishment of the Irish Academy for the Performing Arts".
That project was first publicly supported by the Taoiseach as far back as January 1998. He was commended in a leader article in this newspaper for his insistence that third-level educational developments should proceed "without prejudice" to the encouragement of widespread musical education at more elementary levels.
Two years later the then minister for education, Micheál Martin, and the minister for the arts, Síle De Valera, jointly announced the allocation of €44.4 million to get the project going.
"The Government," said Martin, "is stating unequivocally, for the first time in our history, that it intends to make a major, long-term investment in encouraging and supporting the development of artistic talent in this country."
Yet, after the Government took office, the project was dropped and the funding disappeared. In other words, within a year of the last election, the Government was backsliding on its undertakings and had begun slicing more than €60 million from arts projects. That amounts to more than 20 per cent of the total funding the Arts Council received during the five years covered by the ill-fated Arts Plan.
In spite of the generous words of the Taoiseach and Martin, there has been no major initiative to further music education in our schools. The limited pilot projects that arose from a Department of Arts initiative about the provision of local music services have been starved of adequate resources.
O'Donoghue is once again talking about implementation across the areas of the arts and education. Promises, promises.
It is really sobering to think of the sums that brought the under-funded Abbey Theatre to its knees, or were lost through the demise of the Irish Academy for the Performing Arts in the context of the large amounts spent on the Ppars health service computer project and the electronic voting system. Draw your own conclusions.
Michael Dervan is Irish Times Classical Music Critic