EMER O'KELLY,
Madam, - May I, as a member of the current Arts Council, enter the debate in your letters column concerning Arts Council funding policy? I do not write on behalf of the council, merely from personal experience during service on the council since June 1998.
Your correspondents refer to "Arts Council money". It is not council money, any more than clients can regard it as "their" money as of right. It is your money, Madam; my money; the money of each of your correspondents; the money of every citizen of this country.
The Arts Council disburses taxpayers' money in the furtherance of the arts, and is responsible to the taxpayer in the person of the Comptroller and Auditor General for disbursing that money judiciously and with integrity.
Personally speaking, I have found this an awesome and serious responsibility for the past four-and-a-half years, as much during the period when funding was being described as "generous" as since the advent of the current stringent cuts. Funding for the arts has never been generous enough; there have always been sad, tough decisions to be made, and it has been depressing to have to make them. But there has never been a positive decision that didn't give me a rush of pleasure at what Irish taxpayers were trying to do for their artists and art.
I have chaired many panels of artists' peers when individual bursaries and awards were debated for many hours and finally awarded, and there has always been a huge sense of achievement (all right, as though it really were my money!) at what the results would mean to individual artists.
I have sat with my fellow members of Council over long days of debate over equally long columns of applications for funding (after even more hours of solitary work on back-up documentation), as we struggled, together with the executive, to come to decisions that would be fair and equitable, and always further the arts as much as humanly possible.
I do not claim infallibility; I am sure there were imperfect decisions along the way. But I also know we have struggled to be wise and fair, and to be as faithful to our remit under legislation as we must expect applicants for funding to be as artistically answerable to the taxpayer as we are ourselves.
It's called accountability. - Yours etc.,
EMER O'KELLY, Dublin 8.