EVE O KELLY,
Madam, - The Arts Bill 2002 is the first significant piece of legislation in the arts sector since 1973. Its publication is certainly welcome, but there are two areas of the Bill that are highly problematic and detrimental to the arts in Ireland.
In the first instance the proposal to reduce the Arts Council from 17 members to 9 will mean that balanced regional representation and representation from the range of art forms will inevitably be compromised. Moreover, given the workload council members have to cope with already, this could lead to a serious administrative log-jam at the top of the Arts Council.
Secondly, Section 21 of the Bill proposes the establishment of three standing committees, covering the areas of the Arts and Local Authorities, the Arts and Innovation, and Traditional Irish Arts.
The rationale for the imposition of these particular committees is not at all apparent to us as practitioners. Why three committees at all? Why not have a committee on, say, the Arts and Education? Why give the Traditional Arts Committee powers to recommend funding and not extend that power to the other committees?
For the great majority of arts practitioners, there is great discomfort, not only around the proposal for a standing committee on Traditional Arts but also the proposal that this committee will be invested with unique powers to recommend who in the sector will be deemed worthy of funding.
Irish music, oral literature and dance, and other traditional forms of artistic expression do not need to be detached from other art forms. To suggest that they do is at best divisive and at worst patronising.
The traditional music sector has long seen this bill as holding the key to rectifying the lack of Arts Council recognition for our sector and the poor funding levels for traditional music. But we believe that provisions for a Traditional Arts Standing Committee under Section 21 of the Bill will ghettoise traditional music and will give rise to a set of serious funding problems.
The legislation as a whole brings a new and welcome level of transparency to the workings of the Arts Council, but it falls short of bringing this level of transparency to the standing committees.
Moreover, the make-up of the proposed standing committee now before the Oireachtas will make it far less democratic than either the current or the proposed Arts Council.
The overwhelming majority of organisations that made submissions under the Arts Bill Consultation Process either opposed or did not support the proposal for a distinct Traditional Music Council.In addressing this point, the Price Waterhouse Coopers Report on the Arts Bill Consultation Process recommended that "logic and fiscal rectitude, hand in hand, suggest that the answer [to the problem of funding traditional music\] lies within the existing structures [of the Arts Council] if not in the existing practices".
Such an important and culturally powerful committee should be democratically accountable. There should be transparency and flexibility in its terms of reference, and it should be underpinned by a widely accepted definition of "Traditional Arts".
Most importantly, it should not be allowed to hold the potential it currently does to be divisive.
To enact the Arts Bill as currently framed is to enact division. It is not too late for our legislators to avert this. - Yours etc.,
EVE O KELLY, Contemporary Music Centre, GERRY GODLEY, Improvised Music Company, WILLIE WHITE, Project Arts Centre, MUIRIS O ROCHAIN, Willie Clancy Summer School, GARY PEPPER, Feakle Festival, Cllr PAT HAYES, KATIE VERLING, Glór Irish Music Centre, Friar's Walk Ennis, Co Clare.