Gunboat titles give me a sinking feeling

ON MY cycle home, I passed two of Samuel Beckett’s namesakes: the beautiful bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava and, just east of that, along Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, the LE Samuel Beckett, the Naval Service’s new patrol vessel.

When the naming of the bridge was mooted, my reaction was “how fitting”. But looking at this ship, I could only think, “How dare we.” How dare we put Beckett’s name on the side of a patrol vessel, to be followed early next year by a sister ship, the LE James Joyce. We also have a bridge named after him, but we should draw the line at gunboats.

A bridge is a civic symbol. It is integral to a place, and so are writers. Beckett and Joyce have ennobled their own city like none other of its sons. Beckett, a Nobel laureate, is one of the supreme and most influential artists of the 20th century; Joyce remade Dublin forever in writing about it. Dublin can never be non-Joycean. It is fitting that the writers have bridges named for them.

But a naval vessel is different. It represents the state apparatus of what we prioritise in public life and public spending. It makes sense to name battleships after kings and queens — they are martial symbols of conservative societies. But artists? The state that presumes to name its vessels of war after artists had better have a very good record in using its resources to support those same artists.

But our support for the arts is abysmal. Our political leaders present foreign dignitaries with first editions of poet WB Yeats. They bray about the great tradition of our writing, music and drama. They line red carpets with musicians to greet visiting capitalist buffoons.

Wherever culture can be enlisted to give ‘respectability’ to forelock-tugging panhandling, it’s done. But when the equation is turned the other way, when the arts look for support from the very economy they are unabashedly used to support, the door is closed, the purse strings are tied.

Our public support for our treasured artists amounts to €125m a year. That’s 0.25% of government spending. According to 2011 OECD figures, Austria spends four times what we do, as a percentage; Denmark double; Estonia 10 times; Germany four times; Italy double, Spain four times. We have cut funding for the Arts Council from €85m to €57m. Can you imagine any other sector being asked to take such a hit? This is despite the multiplier effect of arts spending being well-proven: spending on the arts makes money for the exchequer.

But we don’t hear this case being made: the Government arts portfolio is a mere consolation prize. To emphasise its low esteem, the brief is coupled with other unrelated whatever you’re having yerself jobs: tourism, sport, transport — who cares?

It costs nothing to paint the name Samuel Beckett on the side of a ship. But paying real tribute to his legacy would take real engagement and support. You will look in vain for a new-playwrights programme at our national theatre, the Abbey.

You will find no equivalent of the UK’s National Theatre Studio to develop young playwright talent. Ireland’s up-and-coming writers are mostly reduced to self-producing, small-scale works in makeshift spaces above pubs in Dublin. This is no slight on their heroic efforts — but it is an indictment of a nation that dares imply it values theatre and the arts in general.

There is, I should make clear, another option for would-be Irish playwrights. They can leave Ireland. Again, this is an indictment. Decades after Joyce and Beckett did just that, the London-based Irish Post wrote, just last month, of “how Britain is benefiting from the decline in Irish theatre”.

The same depressing article quotes Enda Walsh saying his move to Britain was “the only other option”. Conor McPherson is quoted saying “I just couldn’t get my plays on in Ireland”. While Colin Teevan points to a lack of new plays as the “real problem” in Irish theatre.

And yet, give us a ship and we’ll slap the name of our most famous dramatist on it. Aren’t we a great, cultured, sophisticated country altogether?