ArtScape: The great black hole in Abbey funds gets curiouser and curiouser. Last Friday the line being taken by the theatre on the unexpected additional deficit of €900,000 for 2004 was that while some of it was down to the inadequacy of its recording systems and human error, the bulk was attributable to "touring, national and international". Which was accepted at face value, and reported.
Subsequently it was reported elsewhere, and is claimed by a source who knows about touring, that in fact the international tours made money. How could that tally with the line that higher-than-anticipated touring costs created the unnoticed deficit?
The Abbey acknowledges that in fact international touring made a profit. But it seems to be not quite that simple. It appears the theatre has a single accounting category for touring (national and international), and that is where a large part of the deficit emerged. As far as can be discerned from sources, the international tours of Playboy to the US and The Gigli Concert to Australia, which would have had some guarantees attached, made a profit (the figure of €€300,000 has been bandied about), but not as much as was projected.
The national touring was expected to make a loss - national tours are not expected to be self-supporting, and have to be subsidised - but they lost a lot more than was projected. Box office from the Irish tours was poorer than projected, it has been reported. So touring overall created more of a deficit than was anticipated. However, no one connected with it is ready to go on the record to explain any seeming contradictions in this information, specifically about the role of international touring in the Abbey's finances.
All this, of course, is aside from the issue of why no one noticed the appearance of the large black hole that was last year's extra deficit until early May. Eyes were clearly off the ball at both board and executive level. This seems particularly inexplicable as the Abbey has been in the spotlight since the great unpleasantness last September. There has also been a finance subcommittee of the board in place since early last year, through a lot of the extravagant centenary celebrations. If the information being fed to that committee and the executive was inadequate, why didn't someone do something about it much earlier? Despite the commitment to reform, including a promised redundancy package and restructuring the corporate governance, there has been little tangible progress. The softly-softly approach to change just isn't cutting it.
The theatre says the financial situation will be examined in the consultants' report, which was set in train on Tuesday and is expected to take about three weeks. In the meantime, the Abbey will not make any further comment at all.
Another issue is how much of the Arts Council's bail-out money is being taken into account in rendering the final cumulative deficit figure. The theatre has said that the projected cumulative deficit for 2004, of €2.5 million, excluded the newly discovered €900,000 but included €1 million of the €2 million emergency money (from the Government, via the Arts Council) drawn down last year.
Union acts for the North
This weekend, the UK actors' union, Equity, is holding its annual conference in Belfast, writes Jane Coyle. Some 160 actors, dancers, singers, directors, designers, choreographers and variety artists will gather at the city's Europa Hotel. It's the first time that the event has taken place in the North, and the decision was taken in the light of the tough challenges currently facing the performing arts there.
Equity has called on Peter Hain MP, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to convene urgently a meeting with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission, the BBC and other major broadcasters, independent producers and talent unions so that he may hear first-hand about what the union describes as "a growing crisis".
The profession has recently suffered a number of setbacks, such as a 10 per cent cut in government funding to the Arts Council, a £100,000 reduction in Belfast City Council's arts budget and the under-funding of the Lyric Theatre, where staff have been notified of possible redundancies and operations have been cut to 30 weeks a year. Equity has also expressed the wish to see an increase in home-produced drama from the BBC and UTV.
In a letter to Peter Hain, Equity general secretary Ian McGarry talked of the migration of trained and experienced actors from the North, as a result of lack of work. In its campaign to retain the North's young performing talent, the union is urging Queen's University to introduce professional training for actors and has invited local drama students to take part in a workshop with actors Adrian Dunbar, Ian McElhinney, Maggie Cronin and Dan Gordon, to be held during the conference.
Funds for Irish abroad
The recently established Culture Ireland held its second meeting this week and allocated more than €216,000 to 26 organisations and individuals, including Druid Theatre (€80,000 to bring Synge to the Edinburgh International Festival), Barnstorm Theatre (€25,038 to participate in a young people's festival in Japan), and James Ryan (€5,000 towards Irish participation in a proposed exhibition of Irish art in China). The Culture Ireland board meets again on June 15th and will consider requests for funding for international events at three meetings a year, in September, January and May.
Others who were funded this time include Global Music Foundation (€2,100 for Irish participation in the first international seminar of jazz and other music in Certaldo, Italy); English National Opera (€15,000 towards performing the works of Gerard Barry this autumn in London), and the Sculptors' Society of Ireland (€3,750 for a special edition of Printed Project at the Venice Biennale).