A chara, – I wish to put on record my support for Senator Fiach MacConghail (Home News, May 25th) and Prof Diarmaid Ferriter (Opinion, May 29th) in their decrying recent developments at our cultural institutions.
It is alarming that perfectly functioning institutions are being treated as though they are broken. What Senator MacConghail and Dr Ferriter expose is a government trading what works for what is unknown and unplanned. What we are permitted to conclude is an unseemly bid for central control.
One worrying development sees four cultural institutions without a director, with no prospect of contract renewals or new appointments: a de facto suspension if not termination of these institutions. I want to refer to just one such institution of which I have experience, Culture Ireland.
Its profiling of Irish art on the international stage has, under the tireless and inspired leadership of Eugene Downes, contributed to the restoration of Ireland’s reputation as nothing else. This support for Irish art is now in jeopardy and it strikes me as shortsighted in the extreme.
How ironic we should create emblematic ghost estates in our cultural landscape to join those blighting our countryside. It becomes all the more bitter when bearing witness to a Labour Party dismantling the enlightened institutional arrangements of which it was largely the author in the coalition governments of the 1990s. When it comes to the bureaucratisation of our culture, it is time for a rethink. I am calling for a reversal of recent developments as a matter of the greatest urgency. – Is mise,