Sir, – Fintan O'Toole is to be commended ("It's time the State treated our cultural institutions with respect", Weekend, October 4th) on actively keeping the plight of the cultural institutions before your readers.
These institutions were at rock bottom in the 1950s (the line of buckets to catch raindrops on wet days along the upper floors of the National Gallery said it all). The reversal of a slow but real upturn from the 1960s is made all the more serious by the proposed replacement of real management boards , themselves instituted a decade ago under the National Cultural Institutions Act of 1997, by mere advisory bodies.
A restoration of civil service management is hardy reassuring, given the record of neglect in the past. There was never over many decades a civil service brief to Ministers on the development of these institutions or their needs. The few bold steps were wholly ministerial in origin – Liam Cosgrave in the early 1970s on archives and Michael D Higgins on the institutions at large in the mid-1990s.
As for the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht, under Jimmy Deenihan policy was a mere mantra of private philanthropy coming to the rescue. The Enda Kenny-Heather Humphreys debacle of recent days hardly promises a bright future. – Yours, etc,
Prof LM CULLEN,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.