Sir, – With grave concern I note the possibility of the Department of Public Enterprise and Reform’s rationalisation of Culture Ireland (Editorial, March 7th).
In the seven years of Culture Ireland’s existence the ability of Irish artists in theatre, dance, music, film, literature and visual art to get their work out to a global audience has increased massively. Druid Theatre Company has managed to perform in 32 cities in six countries with nine different productions in six years.
Setting aside the enormous benefits to Ireland from the global showcasing of our country or the benefit to our artists of working alongside their contemporaries across the globe, this has resulted in years of additional employment for Irish actors, writers, designers and technicians, employment that would not have existed without these opportunities. Last year Druid toured the US for 23 weeks, performing with three different productions and pumping hundreds of thousands of euro back into the Irish Revenue (as a result of tax paid by the actors, technicians and designers on this tour).
In addition, these “foreign” tours have resulted in us being able to perform extra performances back at home that simply wouldn’t have happened without the “foreign” tour in the first place.
Without Culture Ireland we couldn’t do this and we also couldn’t do it without the curatorship of the organisation. A curatorship that can only truly flourish with an executive that works with an advisory expert council. The extraordinary specialist staff within Culture Ireland build, develop and broker fledgling relationships with overseas theatres and presenters. They are extraordinarily efficient at squeezing a packed programme of Irish overseas culture from a relatively tiny annual budget of €4 million.
That we have reached a point where it is even being considered that we return to something akin to the old days of a committee within the Department of Foreign Affairs is frightening to me as an Irish artist.
The result will be a massive decrease in our ability to present Ireland on the world stage, a reduction in the reach of Irish culture and an unraveling of the extraordinary work of Culture Ireland has done in the past seven years. – Yours, etc,