Wanted: big ideas for our first national cultural policy

'Culture," Brian Eno says, "is everything we don't have to do." It's a pretty good definition, broad enough to be inclusive yet intriguing enough to make you think. Put that way, culture includes experimental theatre, stadium rock, artisan cheesemaking, GAA and dog racing. How do you go about defining a policy for all of that?

On Monday more than 100 cultural leaders and thinkers assembled at the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the final session of a countrywide series leading up to the drafting of Ireland's first national cultural policy. For the purposes of the policy, culture has been defined to include the arts, creative industries and cultural heritage.

That we don’t already have a national cultural policy isn’t quite as shocking as it might sound – many countries lack one – but here it’s badly needed. One reason is the way the Department of Arts swaps portfolio partners. Heritage came over from Environment, Tourism had been a good companion, Sport went elsewhere. Maybe the department will cosy up to Education after the next election, given 2013’s Arts in Education Charter.

Ultimately, this fluidity in what the core of culture actually is means that arguments for the arts get bent into different shapes, depending on the departmental company they’re currently keeping.

Anger was absent from the assembled company at Imma, where the emphasis seemed more to be on making the most of the opportunity. Also absent from the conversation, and the elephant in the room at least until Ruth Mackenzie took the stage to address the gathering, was the question of cash. Mackenzie was an adviser to five cultural secretaries under the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments in the UK, and was director of the Cultural Olympiad at the time of the 2012 Olympic Games, in London. Money, she said, not only enables things to happen but is also the symbol of commitment to culture that is universally understood, across all sectors and interest groups. Money needs to be talked about, and we all have to dream big.

She noted the relatively few applications after the Arts Council’s open call for 2016 projects that asked for the maximum funding of €500,000. You don’t get world-leading art without thinking big.

Her advice runs counter to current thinking in the arts, which seems to go along the lines of “we’d better be good, trim our dreams, swallow the cuts and hope to one day be rewarded”, borne out by the line in the Culture 2025 discussion document that “it will remain challenging to restore cultural sector funding to 2008 levels”. Reading that, we felt the scale of vision inspired by Mackenzie shrink back to its current domestic proportions.

As the day progressed, notes accumulated on ideas boards. It was difficult to argue with their content. Culture is at the heart of the nation's self-worth. Culture is about both making and participating. Culture goes beyond the subsidised sector. It should be embedded, should transcend politics. Education, heritage and the community are vital. At one point Keelin Shanley, the day's MC, asked the assembled groups to get more specific, echoing the call for clearly defined goals of Minister for Arts Heather Humphreys.

The question is, how do you define a policy for something that everyone agrees is a good thing yet that doesn’t get supported to the degree it does in other countries? It’s a rushed time frame: the Government aims to publish the policy in March, and it won’t be statutory; Humphreys says that she prefers the idea of buy-in, of carrot rather than stick. And, of course, there is an election to negotiate.

So what's to be done? Like the room at Imma last week, Government is full of highly talented people, but the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht is a small one, with a much lower punching weight than, say, Finance. And there's the answer. Just as each government department has to check its plans and policies against the budgets from the Department of Finance, so too should they have to have a cultural budget.

From Agriculture to Education, Jobs to Justice, Children to Foreign Affairs and Trade, a national cultural policy should require each department to measure its plans in light of its commitments to the cultural life of the nation. In Health this can include art and music therapy, plus the excellent art in hospitals programmes. Foreign Affairs and Trade can make huge gains by understanding Irish excellence. In Environment, Community and Local Government, it stretches from heritage to absorbing new cultures.

If a national cultural policy can embed the value of culture across every sector, in a way that is accountable and measurable, we’re on to something. And we need more money, too.

This Tuesday the Arts Council launches an online forum for its Making Great Art Work plan. You can download it at artscouncil.ie/arts-council-strategy.

The closing date for written submissions for the National Cultural Policy is October 31st; ahg.gov.ie/en/culture/culture2025-2