Independence is no good if you don't use it. More than half the members of the Arts Council will be appointed next month and now more than ever, the council needs to be a strong, clear voice that challenges, questions and argues forcefully, writes Marian Fitzgibbon

As a new Arts Council chairperson and six members are to be appointed next month, and in the context of an economic mistral, where and whither the arts in Ireland? Is the next Arts Council to be a caretaker in the main, assuring good governance for a fund that is unlikely to see significant increases in the next few years? Have the major needs of the arts sector been satisfied in the years of the boom? Are recent references in these pages to a "funding crisis" by Theatre Forum overplayed? What is the agenda for the Arts Council and how does it see itself?

The flow of reports issuing from the Arts Council and elsewhere in recent weeks poses that question about where the Arts Council is going. both implicitly and explicitly, pointing by their titles to location issues: In the Frame or Out of the Picture? A Statistical Analysis of Public Involvement in the Arts; Between Filiation and Affiliation - the Space of Art; Points of Alignment: the Report of the Special Committee on the Arts and Education.

Such research bespeaks reflection as well as being fundamental to the advocacy work of the Arts Council, which is to be complimented in involving government advisory bodies with mainstream economic roles, such as the National Economic and Social Forum and the Economic and Social Research Institute, in commenting on the arts - this would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

So what is the message from the council? The recent work follows on The Public and the Arts (Arts Council, 2006) and The Arts, Cultural Inclusion and Social Cohesion (NESF, 2007). The findings of the 2006 Public and the Arts, an update of a 1994 report, was disheartening in relation to the social breakdown of participation in the arts since that time. Particularly so, given the significance of investment in the sector and the degree of institutionalisation of the arts in the interim; above all, it made for difficult reading given the centrality of the "access" argument, since the 1980s, to increased government funding for the arts.

In the Frame or Out of the Picture (commissioned by the NESF from the ESRI) explored this issue more thoroughly, mining the statistical data furnished by The Public and The Arts to confirm the very strong impact of socio-economic background and circumstances in determining people's access to the arts.

The long-awaited Points of Alignment arts in education report, as the most recent in an obese corpus of Arts Council reports, submissions, papers and pilot initiatives, all of which make the case for arts in education and the role of the Department of Education in this enterprise, was launched at the beginning of July with ministerial caveats rather than fanfare. Talk of "longer runways to take-off" for the arts-and-education airship - given the financial downturn - offers little hope. Even a long runway does not a take-off guarantee. Experience shows that there is every chance that the arts and education may be relegated to a perpetual Baldonnel.

And yet Ireland knows very well that education is the only effective way to overcome social disadvantage. Such a situation calls for an Arts Council that is a champion of social inclusion, a strong, clear voice that challenges, questions and argues forcefully.

AS WE HAVE SEEN in some of these matters, the Arts Council has posed the questions and pointed to answers. But what of delivery? Take funding. Arts Council funds have increased significantly since the 1980s. And yet the picture is not uncontested: arts activists have pointed recently in these pages to the ongoing "funding crisis"; and the OECD Factbook 2008, citing specifically the anomaly that this represents in a rich country such as Ireland, puts us well below the average on the table of Government expenditure on recreation and culture in OECD countries.

The Arts Council failed in its high-profile bid for €100 million for 2008. How very strange then that the response of the council to the Budget announcement of last December 5th was to issue a release welcoming their allocation of €82 million and congratulating the Minister for "maintaining the government's existing significant commitment to the arts". The language of the salon, perhaps. But either the Arts Council needed €100 million or it didn't.

Apart from the deep agenda sketched in all those reports, the incoming council faces other major challenges. The capital developments of the 1990s - including many new arts centres and theatres all over Ireland - have created demands that are far from being met, not only in terms of funding. The improved framework and some success stories have obscured deficiencies in artistic content and cultural management, and fragmentation in planning and provision. Endemic cultural deprivation, except in pockets of the main population centres, is still the norm.

Where regional arts facilities exist, their puny budgets do not allow them to provide the kind of artistic programming that is needed. Touring is minimal. The parlous state of music education persists. And what of unfulfilled promises - where is the report on broadcasting promised by the chairwoman of the council in 2006? In the 1970s under Colm O Briain, the Arts Council became a strong and combative voice for the arts in Ireland and a persistent thorn in the side of the government. In the 1980s, during Adrian Munnelly's directorship, despite a rapprochement with its parent Department of the Taoiseach, the Arts Council continued to tilt on behalf of the arts at the powers that were.

It was during this period that the Taoiseach's department disallowed the publication of the Council's annual report because the cover featured a selection of critical headlines and press-cuttings calling for more funds for the arts.

Since the 1990s, a new government department, and a planning relationship as well as the 2003 Arts Act, have created a new context. This act still enshrines the independence of the Arts Council. But independence is no good if you don't use it - though one recognises that its exercise requires deft footwork and sophistication.

In 2004, the first year of Olive Braiden's watch, the Arts Council director resigned - presumably because she felt she had to, her arts plan in flitters. What happened then? Another arts plan - by any other name. The same language too - partnership for the arts. Was it simply a case of "how strange the change from major to minor"?

THE VERACITY OF A putative reorientation toward the artist, as claimed by the departing chairwoman in a recent interview, can only be judged through independent evaluation. True, there has been less talk of late of the Arts Council as a development agency for the sector. Is it just less politically "hot" to limit one's horizons, to move the targets a bit, to drop below the radar?

Similarly, policy responses that consist primarily of pilot initiatives or experiments (such as the Touring Experiment, which ploughed resources into touring for a short period), while they may be effective in profiling, cannot ultimately be considered adequate or equitable. Trimming ambition improves one's chances of being deemed successful in the short term. But such an approach has costs and losses. Most concretely, that one can be swatted aside easily - as in the recent Budget. While it is probably neither possible nor desirable for the Arts Council to man the barricades today against those with whom it will have to sit down tomorrow to negotiate plans and funding, its ambition for the arts in Ireland and its leadership of the arts community must not be compromised by cosiness with Government.

In another July 2008 Arts Council publication, Between Filiation and Affiliation - the Space of Art, its author, Kevin Whelan points to the human need for achieving an appropriate distance from the past (or affiliation) and the role of the arts in this. Our freedom inheres in this distance, as does our ability to imagine and realise alternative futures. How relevant this seems to the prevailing context of consensus in Ireland where the greatest danger is of self-censorship.

Generations deprived of an exposure to the arts (first, through the education system and second, as a result of chronic under-funding) will not have the capacity to reimagine, a capacity that is as central to our social and economic repositioning as a knowledge society as it is to the development of the arts.

Now, as we face a depleted economic larder, as decentralisation policies are being shelved or long-fingered, and as the public service is routinely denigrated, independent voices must help define and defend the public space.

A strong and sophisticated Arts Council is needed for this major task. If it is not to be relegated to a minor role, the new Arts Council must set its sights clearly on the systemic mainstreaming of the arts. The pilot projects that we have seen in recent years have their place but they are no replacement for the real deal.

Kevin Whelan quotes Beckett, who wanted an art "weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road". These recent publications bear witness to an awareness of the task. Let's have more.

Marian Fitzgibbon is head of the school of humanities in Athlone Institute of Technology and author of the Irish chapter of the Council of Europe culture website, www.culturalpolicies.net