"SHE has great strengths, but if you add 10 per cent to a strength it can become a weakness." Patricia Quinn's appointment as director of the Arts Council has been greeted with caution and a degree of fear by many of her peers.
Even among those who positively welcome the appointment, there is widespread recognition that she will need to launch a charm offensive if she is to realise her significant potential as director.
Her skills as a manager are universally recognised as formidable, in a field where such skills are often lacking. Some of those who feel threatened may have good reason to do so; she has always had her hand on the wheel of the drive to professionalise arts management, and well meaning amateurs are likely to be knocked down.
"I would not like to be the person who puts a half baked proposal to her," a colleague, who respects her greatly, said wryly.
"Tenacity is the word that springs to mind," said another. She is enormously focused, some would say blinkered, but that is what delivers the goods."
Ms Quinn has been energetically delivering the goods in the arts area for most of her professional life. She is not a workaholic, however. She has two children, Ellen (6) and Alice (two months), by the novelist and Irish Times Literary Editor John Banville. She is a keen amateur cellist and pianist.
She was born in Dublin 37 years ago, where she was educated at Mount Temple School and at Trinity College. While a student, she was radio critic for In Dublin magazine.
She graduated with an Honors BA in history in 1982. She worked as a book conservationist in TCD library for two years. In 1984, she joined the Arts Council as music and opera officer and later also became development officer.
The professionalisation of arts administration became a passion for her. She built alliances with members of the council who were powerful in the outside world, like Paul McGuinness, manager of U2, and Michael Colgan, director of the Gate Theatre.
She identifies the people you need to get what you want done and plots the way forward with them. She is a great plotter," says a colleague admiringly.
This naturally engendered envy as well as admiration. Her relationships with some other colleagues and some secretarial staff at the council are remembered ruefully as rather abrasive.
Her defining moment at the council, in November 1991, was her organisation of the first major Irish conference on arts management, "The Art of Managing the Arts".
This event had an ambitious agenda: the modernisation of the underpaid, often untrained arts administration sector into a body of high profile professionals, a development not always welcomed by practising artists.
The conference amply demonstrated Ms Quinn's organisational brilliance, in particular her ability to gracefully negotiate the intimidating bureaucratic maze which leads to the pot of funding gold in Brussels. She has never thought small.
This factor was influential in persuading Temple Bar Property's new chief executive, Ms Laura Magahy, to headhunt Ms Quinn as cultural director in May 1992.
THE transformation of a sprawling bohemia into a gleaming cluster of state of the arts national cultural institutions became her new mission. She inherited a virtually complete blueprint from Ms Magahy, which included such innovative proposals as the Ark (a children's cultural centre) and ArtHouse (a multimedia centre).
It also included the refurbishment of existing and independently minded centres such as Temple Bar Galleries and the Project Arts Centre.
Her own most substantial contribution to the plan for the area was DesignYard, the upmarket jewellery and furniture shop.
Her role as cultural director at TBP has been polemical. She has been breathtakingly effective in negotiating with Brussels, Government Departments and the business sector.
A transformed Temple Bar is now a reality, and a significant share of the credit is undoubtedly hers. Her critics would say, however, that she has shown minimal sensitivity towards both artists and arts administrators in the process.
If her combination of high flying success and happy motherhood make her seem like superwoman, some women colleaguers feel that her management style owes more to Margaret Thatcher than to enlightened feminism.
Lenin used to say that you had to break eggs to make an omelette. Patricia Quinn has broken more eggs than were strictly necessary in the cooking of TBP, though she is also capable of compassionate understanding to individuals in difficulty.
COMPLEX character, then, who comes to the directorship of the Arts Council at a complex moment, when the council's relationship with Minister Michael D. Higgins's Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht is still at a formative stage.
The high expectations aroused by The Arts Plan 1995-97 drawn up by the council and the Department have been deflated by its dilution into a still rather nebulous five year programme.
Clients of the council in the regions are nervous that she may focus on glamorous metropolitan projects, like the one she has just left, and neglect small projects, but she probably has too much political wit to fall into that trap.
Her strength of character, fearlessness and razor sharp intellect will be a great asset to a council which has tough battles to fight to maintain its autonomy from the new ministry. She has a much wider range of cultural interests than she is usually given credit for.
"My ambition is to light fires all over the place," she told this newspaper when she was organising the arts management conference.
No one doubts her capacity to do that now. The test of her directorship will be whether the fires can fuel and illuminate the arts world without scorching innocent bystanders.