There was an interesting slip of the tongue during Galway Film Centre's 10th birthday party last week. Not once but twice. ["]Arts, culture and the gaeltacht["] was how Fianna Fail Senator Margaret Cox referred to the Department responsible, when she paid tribute to those who had nurtured the west's burgeoning film industry.
Obviously the Department's name change by her party colleague, Sile de Valera, has not taken hold. And it was the Minister's predecessor, Michael D Higgins, who came in for most praise, along with Lelia Doolan. As Justin McCarthy outlined in his tribute, there has been an explosion in the audiovisual sector in the west since the film centre was formed in 1988. The centre now has 300 members, and runs two NCEA diploma courses in conjunction with Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. It publishes a quarterly, Film West, and it has an extensive range of film and video equipment available to non-members.
Significantly, the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands was not represented at a major international forum on the arts in Stockholm earlier this year. The forum was one of a series, drawing inspiration from a UNESCO document on creative diversity, and a Council of Europe report.
Michael D. Higgins did attend, and we make no apologies for drawing on some of his thoughts on the eve of Galway's annual artsfest - and the day after the World Cup final. As he pointed out in the Dail late last month, the Kirch Foundation in Germany has purchased television rights to the World Cup in 2002 and 2006. If citizens are to watch it without paying, the European Broadcasting Union will have to try and purchase them back.
Sport is an essential part of culture. And yet culture, which would appear to be on the ascendant in terms of public awareness everywhere, is treated as "residual", he said in Stockholm. There are various reasons for this neglected status, in his view. In the EU, for example, the use of culture as a tool of fascism is still remembered. Subsidiarity notions are cited to ensure that neglect of culture is a "national achievement".
He expressed serious concern about the impact of globalisation. "We have the capacity to communicate in a way never possible before. . . to include the excluded, to give life to thousands and millions of unheard stories. . ." But globalisation is synonymous with a new form of alienation, associated with concentration of ownership, fragmentation of audiences and the sort of world that has children bearing the badges of "consumer bondage" - from the baseball caps on their heads to the runners destroying their feet.
Many now fear that we are on the verge of the most complete and subtle colonisation in history, he said. Our citizens will become consumers, with the arrows of international consumption raining on them like unending showers. The crime is passive acquiescence in this transition from citizenship to consumerism.
A new language must be created, in his view, which deals with reconstructions of the past but which places emphasis on an "amnesty" on versions of history and economics. The alternative is an "invitation to amnesia" - as if colonisation, slavery, patriarchy had never occurred.