Sir. – Strikingly, three newspapers have in recent days carried opinion pieces attacking both the fact and the modus operandi of Aosdána. The implicit elitism, hubris, procedural opacity, communicational inadequacy and remoteness of the body have been noted, and evidence for these charges adduced. It has been castigated for what it is (eg, a clearly incomplete cohort of worthy Irish artists), and for what it is not (eg the Académie Française). The underlying anger in these pieces is part of a wider public anger at unaccountable publicly supported bodies. But the unanimity of the critiques, with their calls for abolition or radical reform, are a bit too striking not to invite a response.
To have Aosdána act and comment as a unified body on matters social and political would require a cat herder. There is no good reason why artists of diverse kinds and ages should be any different than other citizens in the variety of their views. In that they are no different from bodies of engineers or lawyers or academics. To require every artist to finance their lives on income from sale of goods is to impose a frankly cruel Procrustean requirement on work that can be initially of minority interest. It may be hard to imagine but I remember attending a reading by Seamus Heaney nearly 40 years ago in the company of fewer than 10 other people.
Aosdána is far from perfect in structure or achievement. In its original conception it tried to address the problems encountered by those who were willing to devote themselves to the uncertain and, all too often, impoverishing pursuits of artistic creation. The hard lives of some household names fuelled that original ideal. In its imperfect way Aosdána has tried to balance the need to honour those who have chosen this challenging path with the utterly realistic recognition of how hard that often is for those who must also balance the demands of a domestic life.
As chairman of the Arts Council (1993-98) part of my responsibility involved firsthand scrutiny of the levels of income needed to qualify for a cnuas. By no standards could most of the applicants be said to be consistently earning close to the average industrial wage. Very few artists achieve consistent financial solvency over a long working lifetime.
Aosdána is not to be financially evaluated on the scale of certain publicly financed charities whose leader’s salary alone would exhaust the annual cost of the whole of Aosdána in six or seven years. The very diversity of its membership ensures that it cannot be very good at defending itself. But, however flawed it may be as a self-selecting body, it shares those flaws with similar self-selecting structures in analogous bodies.
In the justifiable hunt for greater accountability, Aosdána presents an unsatisfyingly easy target, especially when its costs and its purposes are coldly assessed together for what they are. Yours, etc,
CIARÁN BENSON
Lr Ormond Quay,
Dublin 1
Sir, – Regarding Rosita Boland’s report on Aosdana’s general assembly I think you should cut that organisation a little slack. Surely it is one of the few publicly funded bodies that has not reported systemic failures causing the death, injury or impoverishment of citizens. Yours, etc,
FELIM McNEELA,
Ballinode,
Sligo