Madam, - As a veteran, nursing my wounds in an old soldiers' home in Spain, I take an interest in how the Irish arts war is going, and always read the casualty lists.
The latest reported that the director of the Arts Council, Patricia Quinn, champion of the Social Agendaists, and her steed, Arts Plan, were cut down in mid-charge by the Arsgratiaartists, the battalion which marches under the banner of Art for the Sake of Art, once again in fighting form after a long rest in the rear.
General Quinn was carried off the field of battle, bloodied but unbowed.
Arts Plan, the roan stallion she had reared from a foal, had to be put down.
The Arts Council has said it hopes the field where Arts Plan has been, as its euphemism has it, "set aside", will qualify for payments under the Common Agricultural Policy.
Most practising artists I know don't have plans.
The next book, or the next painting, or the next play, maybe, but not a five-year plan to become rich and famous by the accomplishment of the objectives set out in their mission statement. The nearest thing to a plan they have is to get up in the morning and see what the brush or the keyboard or the rehearsals or the welding arc might bring, and hope for the best after that.
The Socialagendaists, who have already prevailed in the separate but related arts war in Northern Ireland, would have artists and arts-workers, as they call them, become a kind of land army to reclaim the countryside, help the disabled, civilise the youth, integrate the immigrants, lighten our darkness and lessen our suffering generally.
The whiff of sulphur would be replaced by the odour of sanctity.
Not that General Quinn's Arts Plan was completely misguided, for it did begin to ask some of the right questions of the enemy's defences, and even opened a few breaches in the walls.
Rather like the Hundred Years War, the Irish arts war, now going on since the foundation of the Arts Council in 1951, is one step forward, two steps back, win some battles, lose some more, with long intervals of boredom and paper-shuffling in between.
From what I hear, for I have been in touch with old comrades who are still in the fray, General Quinn lost this latest skirmish because her old-fashioned maps showed the battlefield only in black and white.
They say it was the subtle shades in the Department of Arts and Craftiness that finally did for her.
Her resigning of her rank and offices, that she thought the only honourable course, for some reason has made me think of Daniel Maclise's Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife: the old Celtic order, semi-naked, wild, poetic, clutching stubby swords and stringless harps, lying dying or dead, while the new Norman order, in head-to-toe chainmail, carrying long swords, maces and axes, muscles forward to take its place.
You know, in the old days, in the trenches, I used to think Patricia Quinn was Strongbow.
Now I wonder if she hasn't been Aoife all along. - Yours, etc.,
BERNARD LOUGHLIN, Sobirà Lleida, Catalunya, Spain.