Today's top feature: Art of budgeting
Minister Mary Hanafin, who also has responsibility for culture, has signalled plans to cut €5 million from spending on the arts in 2011 — as part of a saving of €17m across her department’s three sectors which also include tourism and sports.
In the present circumstances, such a reduction for the arts almost seems moderate.
“If the figures we’re hearing are true, then the department has done very well,” says Tony Sheehan.
He’s the director of the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork which is due to reopen in April after an extensive refurbishment programme.
Mr Sheehan noted: “We’ve all been hit hard in the past few years; we’ve all taken pay cuts and many arts workers have been laid off or had their hours reduced.”
His sentiment was echoed throughout the arts’ sector. “The cuts must be considered a nil-all draw,” says Gerry Godley, a music promoter and one of those involved in the National Campaign for the Arts. “One of the things that emerged out of the cutbacks of the past few years is that they have galvanised the arts community as never before. Our campaign against further cuts has united arts’ workers across the spectrum.”
The National Campaign for the Arts was organised in response to cuts in arts spending over the past three years, which saw the Arts Council’s budget slashed from an all-time high of €83m in 2007 to €73m in 2009 and €69m in 2010.
The campaign’s activities, which have included a national day of action for the arts, may well have convinced the minister to be less severe this time around.
As it happens, the proposed cut of €5m in 2011 will not be borne by the Arts Council alone but will be spread across a number of cultural institutions such as the Chester Beatty Library, the National Concert Hall and the Crawford Art Gallery, along with other initiatives such as Culture Ireland and the Irish Film Board.
However, reducing funding for the Arts Council will have the farthest reaching implications for arts practitioners throughout the country, The agency axed its funding to 30 arts groups in 2010 and it may yet be the case that other groups will see their funding abolished in 2011.
Mary Cloake, director of the Arts Council, says such a move was “very possible and even likely”. It is known the Arts Council believes it more practical to abolish funding to certain groups than spread a reduction across the several hundred groups it supports.
“I don’t want to sound too glum, but neither do I want people to be unrealistic,” says Cloake. “The cuts to our budget for 2011 will be followed by others in 2012 and 2013. This is the first time in its history that the Arts Council has faced into three years of reduced funding — and that’s on top of the last two years of cutbacks.
“Artists and arts groups need to plan for the next three years with that in mind.”
The Arts Council’s recent cuts have impacted not just on arts centres and cultural institutions but also on theatre companies, music groups and festivals: in all, more than 300 applicants to the Arts Council saw their funding reduced in 2010.
In Limerick, for example, the organisers of the annual EV+A festival of the visual arts have effectively had their funding halved. “The Arts Council gave us around €220,000 in 2010,” says EV+A administrator Paul O’Reilly. “We had built up to that level of annual funding over a number of years and it had helped us become an international event with international curators and artists.
“But the Arts Council now proposes to only fund us every second year, from 2012. That means we will probably do some kind of exhibition in 2011 but not the big open submission event we’ve known for. While we have some funding from Limerick City Council, and other funding in kind, we simply can’t raise money from sponsorship to replace the Arts Council’s funding next year.”
Theatre groups were particularly hard hit in 2010. Of the 30 groups that had their funding abolished by the Arts Council, 11 were theatre companies. Many others had their funding cut significantly. Even the Abbey — the national theatre, and the largest organisation funded by the Arts Council — had its funding cut from €8.35m to €7.25m
The Fishamble theatre company in Dublin, which promotes new writing, got €250,000 in funding from the Arts Council this year, a 20% cut on 2009. “We’re doing what we’ve always done; we work with what we have,” says Gavin Kostick, one of the company’s directors. “But there must come a point when arts cuts reach a point of no return, and companies just pack it in.”
As the Four-Year Plan makes explicit, the Government expects further sacrifices; in all, the plan demands savings of €76m from the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport between now and 2014, and the arts sector must expect to shoulder its share of this..
But Kostick echoes the views of many arts workers when he suggests the Government should look more closely at how much the sector actually does to stimulate the economy. “The arts in Ireland have been a great success; they enrich people in all sorts of ways,” he says. “Every other country in Europe in heading for a smart economy, one that recognises the value of culture, but the danger now is that Ireland will lose out on that.
“It’s already been demonstrated that every euro that’s invested in the arts generates three by way of taxation. But reduced funding means reduced activity, and reduced value from the arts.
The Arts Council, along with the other cultural bodies and institutions, will learn on Budget Day just what its funding for 2011 will be. Then begins the process of sifting through applications, and making decisions on who will get what, if anything, to help them function in the year ahead.
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