Minister Sile de Valera's plan to provide the arts with a new legislative framework is timely. As the discussion document, Towards a New Framework for the Arts, launched by her Department last week makes clear, the arts sector has changed beyond recognition since 1951, when the first Arts Act was passed, and even since 1973, when it was amended and extended. The first full ministry for the arts was established in 1993. Since that year, State funding to the sector has grown dramatically - funds to the Arts Council have increased from £10.6 million a year to £35 million. The Minister sets out in the document the key questions to be addressed by submissions from interested parties, which are to reach her Department by October 20th. These will be studied in the drafting of a new Arts Act. The document makes the importance of the arts in the educational system very clear. It goes as far as to ask whether there is a need for legislative underpinning to ensure that the policy of the Minister for the Arts is reflected in the school curriculum.
However, the questioning of the respective roles of the Department of the Arts and the Arts Council is worrying. Few would query the suggestion that the number of council members (now 16, plus chairperson) should be reduced and that members of the council should be replaced one by one - not all at once. But the document goes so far as to suggest that arts policy should be made by the Minister's Department, not by an independent Arts Council, appointed by the Minister.
It suggests that the Arts Council has only been responsible for the making of arts policy because there was no Department of the Arts. It is blind to the purpose of both Eamon de Valera's and William Cosgrave's advisers on the arts, Patrick J. Little, TD, and Thomas Bodkin, respectively, who first proposed the idea of an Arts Council to government. For them, it was not just an interim measure. These men were inspired by the appointment of the Arts Council of Great Britain and excited by the establishment of an independent committee of people dedicated to the arts. The report does not go into the deep concerns which the thought of direct political control of the arts must provoke. Before the council was established, the Cultural Relations Committee under a Fianna Fail Department of Foreign Affairs, suppressed the talent of film-maker, Liam O'Leary, because his Our Country had previously helped Clann na Poblachta to election victory.
How can we be sure that future governments would never apply such crude political parameters to arts policy? Depressing sections of the discussion document mention a pre-set ratio of funding for arts in the Irish language, a Traditional Arts Council for traditional music and dance, and the holding of separate Aosdana meetings in English and in Irish. These ideas smack of the interests of pressure groups. In fairness to the Minister, she has, in publishing this discussion document, given those who care about the arts in Ireland a chance to register an overwhelming vote against direct political control of the arts. It is a chance they should seize.