The State’s attitudes toward artists belongs in the theatre of the absurd

It was vicious to watch. Two elderly tramps taunt and attack each other.

One, one legged in a wheel chair, the other blind. Maybe worse was the gawking of the crowd alternatively laughing and appalled, but none the less entertained.

This happened last Saturday night in a derelict site on the corner of Moss Street and City Quay. City Quay stretches along the south bank of the Liffey opposite the International Financial Services Centre. East and upriver towards O’Connell Bridge is Georges Quay surmounted by the squat towers of the Ulster bank complex.

The lights from those offices lit the derelict site dimly. West and downriver is Sir John Rogerson’s Quay gleaming with glass blocks of offices and apartments.

It is unfathomable what is accounted as important. The events described while real were staged for an audience as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. Samuel Beckett’s short play Rough for Theatre I is a searing altercation of violence and need between two broken, mutilated men. One in a wheelchair could see, the other blind could walk. Bereft of any other company perhaps they could lean upon one another. It is a possibility but we never know if it is realised. We are not told. We must imagine for ourselves.

Among the apparently important issues debated by the political party’s during their think-ins this week as they prepare to return to the Dáil today one certainly didn’t merit much mention — the arts.

It is strange that a country relentlessly pimping its artists to reset its reputation abroad should be so extraordinarily careless of their welfare at home.

Year after year budgets that were paltry at their peak have been cut and cut again. Another cut is pencilled in for budget day. As the spare change becomes ever sparser, what has become ever more plentiful is smug, patronising, condescension. Artists who toil intensely to hone an art form and hold it in public view sometimes literally for one instant at a time, are disrespected by the State.

I say the State because this is bigger than just government. It certainly predates this government and is wider than it. The honour paid to Séamus Heaney on his death, was a repayment of a debt that only in very few and exceptional cases is ever paid to artists in life.

We and politicians on our behalf patronise artists because we uneasy with them. We fancy we love the ideal, but confronted with the reality of art that is less than soothing, we are surly. The dichotomy of the attitude of the state towards art, all plámás and parsimony, is re-enacted on the political stage itself. We do not honour our artists because we do not respect ourselves.

Today as the Dáil reconvenes the Ceann Comhairle meets with the members of the Oireachtas Commission on the future management structure of our parliament. Ciarán Coughlan the respected and long serving Clerk of the Dáil and Secretary General of the Houses of the Oireachtas has retired.

During his long tenure, a decade ago now, the Oireachtas Commission was established to oversee the management of the two houses of our parliament. The posts vacated by Coughlan predate the Commission. There are important issues to consider. Is it is apt to reconfigure his role in ways that respond effectively to the decades ahead instead of simply replicating a template inherited from a very different era decades ago? The quandary is that the Ceann Comhairle may be vested in the dignity of office, but the office holder is equipped with little of the power to meet the expectation that comes with it.

Last week, the Government announced a package of measures for Dáil reform. But the Ceann Comhairle was not consulted. Neither was the commission he chairs. The Committee for Procedure and Privilege with oversight of the Dáil’s parliamentary procedures was likewise ignored. Its subcommittee on Dáil reform was also effectively overlooked.

The package for Dáil reform, conjured up in a campaign to abolish the Seanad, is anodyne. It leaves power firmly where it is in the hands of government. It moves none of it onto the floor of our elected parliamentary body. It fails to provide that the Ceann Comhairle is elected by secret ballot.

Like the baked beans imagined and lusted after by Beckett’s tramps, the prize is too much for government to give up on. Ignored even in regard to procedural changes within its own institution, the Oireachtas Commission is powerless to effect the reconfiguration of its own internal management should it wish. If it opts for change it must go cap in hand to government. Only government has the effective power to make the necessary legislative change. The Dáil only has the role of rubber stamping what government decides.

A great debate across all sorts of issues is between nature and nurture. Are we like this because it is our nature or have we turned out like this because of how we are nurtured? Our politicians are nurtured in a system where only the power of government is respected. The power of Ideas have little value; idealists are derided. This is strange because ideas are the currency by which power is acquired. But power is the means by which ideas are asphyxiated.

The theatre of two tramps in a derelict site is a parable for our national conversation. Confronted with blindness that prevents us seeing and an amputated leg that keep us from walking we cannot lean in, one upon another. The challenge of change is too great. If we changed, we wouldn’t be the same. If we weren’t the same, how could we go on? Few if any in our fractured society have commented, analysed and answered as honestly as artists.

None have done more for less, and did it long before that humbug was reinvented as a metaphor for adding insult to injury. We like the romance and the blather of talk and thoughts. But artists confront us. They too often, sometimes violently, sometimes slyly show us up in a mirror we recoil from. Too late we realise we are actually laughing at ourselves. In their comedies we are the clowns.

In contrast the political theatre that we script, act and direct as citizens is rude and repetitive.

The cruel, moving and ultimately unresolved connection between two imagined but intensely real, human beings is a sign and symbol of us all. Chalked on the ground last Saturday night were other words of Beckett: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

We are wary of and embarrassed by artists because we are mortified by what they show up in ourselves. Our regard for them is measured out in small change soon to be smaller still and of course, our handclapping. Handclapping and backslapping; that is us acting out our lives as extras in our own drama, actors with no lines, in a play with no plot.