Both the Arts Council and the Government recently issued documents looking to the future of the arts in Ireland. The council sets out a 10-year strategy and the Government has initiated a “national discourse” on a state cultural policy. The latter, which correctly but opportunistically cites culture as a badge of national identity, comes disappointingly late in the coalition’s term of office.
Both documents contain language that puts perhaps too much emphasis on the economic performance of the arts. The architects of strategy and policy might pay heed to President Higgins’s repeated warning that culture should not be considered a “commodity”. In recent years the arts have been nudged too far in that direction, notwithstanding a legitimate and appropriate focus on the need for prudent use of limited public finances.
The Arts Council speaks of “change and renewal”, which may mean the death-knell for some existing beneficiaries of funding. It needs to spell out what it means by “collaborative, community-focused arts practice”; to some ears that may sound doctrinaire and prescriptive. At the same time, the ambition to provide children and young people with “access to culture as part of their education and development” can only be applauded. But it is time to stop talking and actually do something about it.
The rhetoric of these documents will need to be matched by adequate investment in the immediate years. However the recent Budget, framed in the context of an impending general election, offers no positive signal of that happening. Although the Department of Arts secured a significant sum to fund 1916 commemoration projects, chairwoman of the council Sheila Pratschke was right to describe the miserly increase to the council as “a blow to artists and arts organisations already struggling to survive”.
Perhaps the first response to the call for “national discourse” should be a more vociferous demand for proper recognition of where all art begins – with the artists.