The Arts Council budget has been slashed by 20 per cent - and this means hard times for many in the arts sector. But why are some groups facing cuts of up to 60 per cent, while others, particularly arts resource organisations, have been treated better? Arminta Wallace writes.
Not long ago, this newspaper devoted an entire page to a virtual tour of new theatres and arts centres which had opened around the country over the past couple of years. Not long ago - or should that be "once upon a time"? Compared to the chill winds which have been blowing around the arts sector of late, those upbeat days are beginning to take on the rose-tinged hue of fairy-tale. A scant seven months ago, the new Arts Plan, which promised €53 million for the development of the arts sector in Ireland in 2003, was adopted as government policy; come the Budget, the €53 million shrank to €44 million - a 20 per cent cut on the projected figure and an eight per cent cut on the previous year's funding of €47,869,148.
Suddenly, in the arts as in other sectors of the economy, the talk was of cuts and reductions - and the Arts Council, obliged to divide its cake between a plethora of new clients as well as its more established recipients, was faced with an unpalatable choice: either cut everybody equally to reach the required percentage, or wield the scissors with a will and make some very unkind cuts indeed in certain areas. The council - in keeping with its perception of itself as a proactive development body? - took the second option, choosing to maintain funding to resource centres, festivals and the individual artist while allowing the axe to fall mainly on non-venue-based production companies. Unsurprisingly, those of the latter who were hit the hardest were quick to express their unhappiness.
"We are astonished, we are hurt and we are incredibly disappointed," says John Scott of Irish Modern Dance Theatre.
Expecting to receive €250,000 as the third instalment of a multi-annual funding agreement, his company instead received an offer of €100,000 - a whopping 60 per cent cut. Also in the final year of a three-year allocation was the early music ensemble, Christ Church Baroque. "The amount we had been allocated for the third year was €117,000, and that has been cut back to €60,000, so it's almost a 50 per cent cut," says artistic director Mark Duley. On the theatrical front, Waterford's Red Kettle has just come out of a three-year period when it was given €380,000 a year, into the cold grey reality of €200,000 for next year - a 35 per cent cut.
For all three, the cuts mean fewer productions - which will, inevitably, lead to job losses in the arts sector. "It's going to severely disrupt our programme," says Scott, who had planned a collaboration with a German choreographer as well as national and international tours and a new version of IMDT's highly successful 1995 show Macalla.
In an attempt to put a positive spin on the situation Christ Church Baroque will use the coming year as a period of consolidation. "But the bottom line is," says Duley, "there's going to be less music-making. We were building up to an event per month, but that's not going to be possible."
As for Red Kettle, Hennessy says that his funding application to the Arts Council this year was based on a programme of three shows. "Now it looks like we'll be doing one show, and a small show at that. What it means is that the cuts impact on actors, writers and directors." Red Kettle's commitment to touring adds another layer of misery to the mix; "in recent years we've tried to tour every show all over the country, so our cut will instantly impact on all those venues," he says.
Such reactions are not only understandable, but predictable - and the story is echoed all over the sector as touring programmes are reduced and shows disappear. Cork City Ballet, for example, has received no funding at all for next year; the Irish Chamber Orchestra has had to drop its spring tour, a highlight of its annual calendar and - worse still - cut performing contracts, with musicians now on seven-month instead of 10-month agreements.
Unthinkably, Opera Ireland's spring season has been cancelled. Surprisingly, however - given the severity of the cuts to Red Kettle, Christ Church Baroque and Irish Modern Dance Theatre - all three groups insist that they have no idea why they should have been singled out for radical reductions in funding.
"Obviously we were aware of the estimates and we expecting some cut - but the extent of it has come as quite a shock," says Hennessy.
"Also, studying the figures as against last year's grants, it seems to me that it represents more than just a percentage cut. It marks a shift where we've been moved further down the funding ladder. We would have been fourth - after the Abbey, the Gate and Druid - but now we're somewhere around 12th. Eight companies have joined us or passed us out; and of those, six are based in Dublin city.
"This reneges not just on a promise we had a few years ago to bring us into line with Druid, who were felt to be at an adequate level of funding, but also it undermines the view of Waterford as a regional centre for excellence in theatre. Both of those have been reneged on without any signalling from the Arts Council - in fact, quite the opposite."
John Scott, for his part, was under the impression that Irish Modern Dance Theatre's artistic star was on the rise. "Since the multi-annual funding began, we've created a body of work with international choreographers. We've always been very involved in the entire landscape of dance in the country, and worked well with other companies and other dancers and choreographers. Our programme for next year had all been agreed with the Arts Council, we've always had a good relationship with the dance officer and with the executive - and we had no indication that our relationship with the council was deteriorating, so we in no way expected what happened."
In a way, what these companies are describing is the shock experienced by many people in Ireland when the disastrous state of the nation's finances was revealed prior to the Budget. But in terms of arts funding, if tough decisions have to be made, it would appear to be vital that the process by which those decisions are made, and the criteria on which they are based, should be spelled out for all to see. Even if this involves, perhaps, telling companies that their productions aren't up to scratch?
"There's no doubt that companies go through the doldrums from time to time, and this has to be acknowledged," says Ciaran Benson, a former chairman of the Arts Council. "The council has been saying to the arts sector that they must give value for money and that organisations must be efficiently and effectively managed. Of course that has to cut both ways. If you are demanding this of those whom you are supporting and encouraging to develop, then you yourself have to be an exemplar. You're demanding rationality of your clients, and you can only credibly do that if you are accountable in your dealings with them. Fundamentally, it comes down to matters of trust and judgment."
The council, for its part, is confident that its reasoning process is open and fair. "Our approach to funding this year was governed by a number of factors," says director Patricia Quinn. "First of all, this year's budget comes on the back of slow or no growth, in real terms, for the last three years. If you adjust for inflation, you will see that we haven't had a real increase in funding since 2000. Second, we always use criteria of quality - whether in artistic ambition and achievement, or management - in making funding decisions. Whatthe council has tried hard to do is strike a balance between a wide range of competing claims, being fair and equitable to all in difficult circumstances, and maintaining a fundamental rationale which looked to the long-term well-being of the arts.
"Of course, I fully appreciate that there are disappointed people in the sector, but the fundamental reason why we made decisions to give smaller and fewer grants than people would have liked is that we had less money to spend. I am truly surprised to hear that people are expressing themselves to be in the dark about the thinking behind our decisions. The fact is that there have been many intensive discussions - whether in one-to-one meetings or phone calls - to explain and clarify the thinking behind individual decisions."
More of these meetings will take place in the coming weeks. But if the companies who have been cut back may be generally perceived as having failed, at one level or another, what of the companies whose funding has been maintained, or even increased? There aren't many of these, needless to say - but the contemporary music group Crash Ensemble, singled out for praise in its work in bringing contemporary music to a wide audience, held its core grant at €44,000 and was also offered €40,000 towards its Up North! festival. Last year it received €60,000 as a one-off festival grant; "so in a way you can look at that as going up by €40,000 or you can look at it as coming down by €20,000", says the group's artistic director, Fergus Sheil. Nevertheless he admits to being "quite pleased" with the award.
So does Crash Ensemble know what it did right? "There has been a recognition that we have been very successful in attracting alternative sources of funding - which is difficult, and needs a lot of work," says Sheil. "We had €60,000 from the Arts Council for last year's festival but the total budget was over €150,000. We were able to source the rest elsewhere, which I think is quite important and is, I think, why we were able to maintain our grant." For Crash Ensemble, the Catch-22 is that to continue to develop these outside relationships, it needs money. "If you want to get a grant from the Finnish government, there's a huge amount of man-hours involved in servicing that grant and providing the audited accounts afterwards. We need somebody now to be working flat out on plans and partnerships and arrangements for 2004, 2005, 2006; otherwise we're going to be chasing our tails and going from one concert to the next without a long-term vision."
Like many of his colleagues in hard-hit production companies, Fergus Sheil is puzzled by the Arts Council's decision to retain funding to resource centres and organisations. "If the money is not being invested in the people who are making the arts, then there won't be any need for the resource centres - unless they're going to be much more proactive than they are at present, which is not necessarily what they're designed for," he says. Patricia Quinn, however, is unrepentant: "In most cases we reduced the funding to these organisations as well," she says, "but by a smaller margin than in other programmes.
'Arts resource organisations' spans a wide range, mostly focussed on serving the needs of artists to produce, fabricate, rehearse or otherwise develop work, or to develop their artistic practice or career. For relatively modest grants in most cases, they provide a unique service - there is only one Association of Professional Dancers in Ireland, for example, one Association of Architects in Ireland, one Music Network, one Contemporary Music Centre, one Tyrone Guthrie Centre."
Quinn dismisses the argument that at a time of cutbacks, resource centres will manage to carry on at some level, while the people who are actually producing art may go to the wall. "The opposite is true," she says. "Production companies, with greater access to other sources of revenue will in most cases continue to operate, albeit at a reduced level of output. By their nature, resource organisations have less earning capacity, and their administrations - often only one or two people - could not sustain cuts without compromising their service offering."
That the word "administration" should be a recurring theme in the arts arena is not accidental. Up until quite recently, arts administration in this country was a patchy affair; small companies and arts centres were run by dedicated individuals, or groups of individuals, as a labour of love.
The Arts Council has, quite rightly, been working to change that and move the sector on to a more professional infrastructure. It has also fought long and hard for more administration jobs for itself - jobs which are now coming on stream, to the outrage of some of those small companies which will almost inevitably, since their funding has been reduced or withdrawn, disappear off the arts map in the coming weeks and months. But in the longer term, is there a danger that the new-found emphasis on "organisation" may begin to outweigh the emphasis on "arts"?
"There are two points to be made here in this time of cutbacks," says Ciaran Benson. "First, relative to Arts Councils elsewhere, the Irish Arts Council has always been understaffed, and those staff at officer level have, I believe, been undergraded.
"Yet they have been very effective. The burden on them, however, has been great. The Department of Finance, and various pay review bodies, have generally opposed attempts to rectify this situation. In a buoyant economy, such jobs tended to be relatively uncompetitive. In the 1980s there was a different balance of motivations, and vocational satisfactions were visibly to the fore amongst those working in the arts.
"The second point relates to this. Throughout society, and the arts are no exception, the language of management has become the dominant language. All too often it settles like a grey dust on what should shine and attract. Everything becomes a management problem. Vitality is lost. In my view, the managerial must sensitively serve the discourses of art, and not subjugate them."
If the shine is not to disappear from those sparkling new venues in 2003, it looks as though all parties in the arts in Ireland will have to review their housekeeping priorities.
