It's good that Taoiseach Enda Kenny is showing an interest in the arts.
And it's even better that, as reported in this newspaper recently, he's being straight up in acknowledging the need to put "arts and culture at the centre of public policy, in a way that, frankly, we have failed to do until now".
Regard the “until now” as a red herring, a white lie included for the sake of respectability.
The fact that he focuses on the failures of the past is an understandable political sidestep, a convenient way of pretending that the issue is somehow being resolved.
His concentration on the success of the Easter Rising commemorations conveniently broadens the scope well away from what most people understand by “the arts”.
The real issue that Kenny is touching on can be addressed, now and for the foreseeable future, in four simple words that people will need to share, to tweet and probably shout until they’re hoarse if they want to make a difference: show us the money.
Kenny and the Minister for the Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Heather Humphreys missed the single biggest opportunity they were ever likely to have to light a fire under the arts community when they failed to consolidate the extra funding secured for the 2016 commemorations into a kind of quantum leap in State funding for the arts.
In the larger scheme of things, the extra 2016 spend – €48 million – is not huge.
Meagre
State support of the arts in Ireland is so meagre that even if Kenny, Humphreys and the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan were to have made the brave move and added the amount of the special 2016 allocation in the core 2017 arts budget, they still would not have lifted Ireland off its unenviable bottom-of-the-league slot when it comes to State support of the arts in Europe.
Ireland often pats itself on the back for its treatment of artists.
The self-congratulation focuses on two schemes. There’s the tax-free treatment of earnings from creative activity that was introduced in the late 1960s.
This special treatment remained uncapped until 2005, when a ceiling of €250,000 was imposed.
It has since been further curtailed though it still allows earnings up to €50,000 from creative work to remain exempt from income tax.
Since 1981 there has also been Aosdána – officially a body set up to honour artists, but one which is of more immediate importance to artists because of the annual €17,180 stipend, or Cnuas, that its members can claim.
Aosdána is intended to represent the cream of the cream among our living artists. The Cnuas is a means-test grant, available only to artists whose earnings do not exceed one-and-a-half times the value of the Cnuas itself. In other words, it’s only available to people whose total income does not exceed €25,770.
Female artists
In fairness, this kind of support is not to be sneezed at. Most of us would be delighted to have such a scheme to fall back on.
The key marker here is that, among the country’s top artists who are members of Aosdána, 154 out of 248 were claiming the cnuas last March. I doubt if you took the 250 leading lights in any other area of endeavour in the country that you would find a similar situation.
That's why writer John Banville resigned from Aosdána in 2001. He left so that a younger, needier artist would be able to take his place.
The Arts Council periodically surveys the earnings of artists. In 2008, artists managed to earn an average of €14,676 from their creative work. Higher earners skew that average.
A full 50 per cent of artists earned less than €8,000. Only the top 25 per cent managed to generate personal incomes – from all sources, non-artistic as well as artistic – of more than €31,000.
The bottom 25 per cent all had total personal incomes of less than €11,475.
Average earnings for all workers in 2008 came to €36, 229. Average earnings for artists (including their non-artistic work) came to €25,085.
Most shockingly of all, the earnings of female artists were less than half those of their male colleagues.
The 2008 figures were documented in a report published in 2010, which pointed out that “while artists may have similar levels of education to many of those in the managerial and professional group, their earnings are closer to (and actually below) workers in the clerical, sales and service sector category (such as childcare workers, shop cashiers and hairdressers)”.
Zero benefit
Aosdána is actually of zero benefit to the majority of artists, simply because they are not members of it.
And the income tax exemption is of little benefit to the cohort of artists who don’t earn enough to be paying income tax in the first place. And you can take it that things have been getting worse rather than better.
The Arts Council’s core funding was €81.6 million in 2008. This year it was €60.1 million. It’s unlikely that artists’ earnings will have done anything other than fall over the same period, too.
The State's parsimony in relation to the arts is nothing new. The Irish Government's official memorial to assassinated US President John F Kennedy was to be a concert hall named in his memory. It was announced in 1964, but never built.
The replacement for the National Concert Hall on Earlsfort Terrace was also announced but never built.
A new home for the National Theatre never materialised.
And the State never took ownership of what’s now the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, though that is what was originally planned.
Aosdána only deals with the needs of creative artists. In Ireland, in contrast with many European countries, the long-term career development and support of interpretative artists – actors, musicians, dancers – is simply not catered for, at all.
At the weekend, Ms Humphreys spoke of a “Legacy Project for Ireland 2016 – a five-year initiative, from 2017 to 2022, which will place arts, culture and creativity at the centre of public policy in a way that we have never attempted before”.
Again – show us the money.
