Séamas O'Reilly: Arts funding rows hurt artists who struggle to break even
Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
On Monday, arts minister Patrick O’Donovan was reported to be sending a letter to the various bodies overseen by his department, insisting their budgets will be thoroughly scrutinised going forward.
This came after recent revelations that the Arts Council had spent €6.7m on an IT system that did not work, in another case of manic overpayment from a government that seems addicted to them.
On Tuesday, that debacle was joined by the story of the National Gallery’s scanner, a giant X-ray scanning device the gallery bought for over €120,000 in 2017, but still haven’t found a room that fits it, eight years later.
Coming just 24 hours after the minister’s proclamation about tightening the belts of arts funding, it was hard not to see his earlier statements as a shot across the bow in preparation for a battle he knew was coming.
Tánaiste Simon Harris described his ‘absolute fury’, Taoiseach Micheál Martin called it ‘incomprehensible’, and the scene was set for yet another parable of profligacy, one that would usher in a new, hard-nosed approach to governmental wastefulness.
Now, I’m not saying I don’t trust this government to react to this situation in good faith, as both custodians of the public purse and heartfelt guardians of the arts.
But the news coverage of the X-ray scanner induced a slight tremor in people who, like me, did think they should have found a room to put it in before buying, but also wondered why it was universally bookended by reports that suggested arts grant recipients would now have to explain their spending to O’Donovan’s department.
The first, most pedestrian observation one can make, is that the individuals who receive arts grants very much do explain their spending, repeatedly, in the several forms that make up grant applications.
Ask anyone you know who has had the pleasure of drafting such a proposal, and you’ll know just how few pennies are left up to chance.
Adding extra checks and paperwork to this process would not merely be performative but redundant, and thus themselves a wasteful and expensive replication of labour.
And all while serving as yet another chilling effect on the already struggling ranks of artists, writers, musicians, and creatives of Ireland.
The lot of an Irish artist is tough. Almost all experience low pay, indeterminate hours, scant benefits, and minimal pension provisions.
Most subsidise their art with other work, in the face of exorbitant housing, childcare, and living costs.
In 2017, a few short years after being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, author Donal Ryan revealed he was going back to his job in the civil service, causing great shock among the public, but probably not among his fellow authors, nor the many thousand poets, painters, musicians, and artists of all stripes who know just how hard it is to break even in their craft.
Artists should be getting more generosity, not less. In fairness, positive strides toward this have been made in recent years.
Since 2022, the Basic Income for the Arts scheme has been in place, granting a weekly wage to 2,000 artists in order to alleviate such pressures.
It was extended in October by the last government, a welcome sign of both its success and popularity, measures that one hopes Minister O’Donovan will take into account now that the scheme falls into his purview.
It would be nice to believe that the added checks and balances mooted by his department will apply only to large procurements, or the outsourcing of big sums to external contractors — the sorts of transactions which have formed the basis for every one of these famous scandals over the years.
But it is hard to avoid the sense that the Government’s newfound notions of austerity will skip right past the men in suits and pass directly to the artists who rely on government funding to pursue their work, at very little cost to the State, and to all our collective benefit.
Ireland, happily, punches above its weight in terms of culture. Our artists are celebrated, and envied, worldwide.
It’s tempting, therefore, to make the capitalistic case for their contributions to the economy, or a hard-nosed defence of arts funding as a preposterously valuable agent of Irish soft power throughout the globe.
I believe such arguments to be entirely sound, but I’ll let others make them, and for one simple reason.
I am idealistic enough to believe that art is not a mere saleable commodity, nor a pleasant luxury, and arguing for its utility in terms of commercial applications is to cede essential ground to those who deny this.
Art, and the promotion and protection of art, is the lifeblood of any functioning, moral society.
At the risk of sounding high-minded — and where else but in a defence of civilisation itself should one be prepared to do so? — it is the best process we have yet developed for discerning joy and meaning from existence.
It is, as Kurt Vonnegut once put it, the practice of making the soul grow.
Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington once quipped that a cynic was ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
I would hope those minding the purse strings of Irish culture keep those words in mind. We know them, 133 years later, because Wilde was a wealthy son of Irish aristocracy, and thus lucky enough to have the money to write them.
It’s not too much to ask that everyone, whatever their means, should be given that same chance.
