The €6m joke behind Limerick City of Culture

Why didn’t Michael Noonan just throw €6 million at his native city? He could have got somebody like Patricia Ryan to rebrand the city, going forward, adding value as she went, all the way to a performance-related bonus.

There might even have been a role for Pat Cox, ambassador at large for the city.

Cox could have featured on a billboard poster campaign. “Hi, I’m Pat, politician extraordinaire. Not everybody in Limerick is like me”. Why not? Noonan’s predecessor, Charlie McCreevy would have done something just like that.

Back in the day, when the country was awash with money, McCreevy threw €50m at his local racecourse, Punchestown.

Things are allegedly different in the brave new world that dawned after the 2011 general election. Fine Gael and Labour were elected to clean up politics, and hunt Fianna Fáil out of Dodge. It simply wouldn’t do to have Mr Noonan, the man with the money, just click his fingers and deign that a wad of it be ferried to his backyard.

Besides, the Troika was looking over Noonan’s shoulder. Diverting funds to local tribes is the kind of thing the boys in the IMF usually encounter among tinpot dictators in the developing world. They couldn’t be exposed to that sort of carry-on here, in the best small country in the world to do business in.

So somebody came up with a bright idea. Let’s hand over the cash under the guise of awarding Limerick something called “the national city of culture”. If only those goddamn artists with their quaint notions of integrity and truth had just got with the programme. Instead, there was all this palaver, and the only thing that was rebranded was the old staple of Irish politics, the stroke.

The announcement that Limerick was to be awarded the state’s first national city of culture came in July 2012. There was no competition. No panel of experts. No goddamn artists with flowery notions. It was just commanded by Noonan that it be so.

Six months later a board was appointed, headed up by Cox. The former MEP’s appointment was due to his status as a Freeman of the City. Fellow Freemen Paul O’Connell and Bill Whelan were also on board. I will yield to nobody in my admiration of O’Connell’s ability in the line-out, but it’s news to me that the arts are close to his heart.

Whelan is of course a composer, but apparently he owed his appointment to his status as a freeman. One place in the 10 person board was specifically reserved for a practitioner of the arts, just to take the bare look off things.

Thereafter, Noonan was slow in coming up with the bobs. This may have been because he was sussing out how much he could throw at the venture, or perhaps he feared the Troika might call him out on it. Meanwhile, plans went ahead. An artistic director, Karl Wallace, was appointed last March after a rigorous selection process.

His salary was circa €65,000, a tidy sum but hardly big bucks for somebody charged with producing a city of culture. Wallace was obviously under the impression that the board and the local minister were serious about this culture stuff.

Around the same time, Patricia Ryan took up a role as part-time consultant to the board. It is unclear how she came into this role, but as the world now knows, she had a long association with both Cox and his former party, the Progressive Democrats.

She was paid €700 a day over the following six months for consulting, earning close to €40,000 by November. Whatever she was consulting on, it certainly wasn’t culture.

She freely admitted she had no experience in this area, but in light of the whole thrust of the venture — from Noonan down — this was probably what Cox might describe as “a blessing in disguise”.

The summer came and went and still no sign of the bobs. Ryan, and Wallace and his team were all paid out of local authority coffers. Then in October, under cover of the Budget, Noonan decided that he could safely get away with throwing €6m their way. It was all systems go.

The time had arrived to appoint a CEO, but it was apparently too late to do it by the book.

Ryan got the job after the city manager “spoke” to a few candidates. Cox said he did not solicit on her behalf.

He didn’t have to. Having been a “consultant” to the board for the previous six months, she was the obvious choice. Realistically, she could only be bested by somebody with vast experience applying in the type of rigorous selection process to which Karl Wallace had been subjected. But there was no time for that sort of stuff. A city was waiting to be rebranded.

Ryan’s contract was for €120,000, to run 18 months and also had as an extra a “performance-related” bonus of €15,000. How would her performance be evaluated? Surely not on the expressions of culture or art?

How come it was her and not Wallace who was on the performance-related bonus? She gave a hint as to her real brief when she tangled with lads from the Moyross Youth Crew rap group who hadn’t got with the programme.

Ryan thought one line in a song that was to be performed was “really not the image we want to portray”. Did you know that culture and the arts were about portraying an image? By the time the opening night came along on New Year’s Eve, the gloves were off.

No more of this artistic claptrap. Instead of having Wallace direct the evening’s events, the whole shebang was handed over to an events management company.

That’s how to achieve your goal of rebranding the city, going forward, adding value, in the best small country in the world for talking with a forked tongue.

So it was that Wallace and two of his team could take no more and resigned.

The real gutter politics emerged in the immediate aftermath of Wallace’s departure.

Cox’s reference to Wallace being subjected to a performance review in December came from the same quiver as his “hands-off” approach to Ryan’s appointment. By calling into question, in an entirely vague manner, Wallace’s competence, Cox was trying to deflect from the reality that it was the man’s integrity that prompted him to pack it in.

The end result is that now there appears to be a genuine effort to promote the city’s culture by including a range of arts practitioners and administrators. The city of culture title might actually mean what it says on the tin.

What the whole affair illustrated more than anything is the complete disregard in which the arts are held in politics. The only upside is that the farrago has surely produced material for somebody in Limerick’s rich seam of creative talent.

Right now, I have no doubt that some bright spark is pulling together the strands of a farce.

The art of the stroke, anyone?