L'Imaginaire Irlandais, the French festival of the Irish arts, originally conceived by President Robinson and the late President Mitterrand, was launched in Paris last week with a characteristically inspiring speech by the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Mr Michael D. Higgins. The festival promises to foster new, imaginative, and long term links between the arts in both countries, and Mr Higgins' upbeat address was a fitting introduction to the vitality of contemporary Irish culture for the French media.
In general, however, the gap between rhetoric and reality in our cultural politics has grown disturbingly wide. The rhetoric, much of it emanating from the Minister himself, repeatedly reminds us, on other less fitting occasions, of the quality of our artistic achievement, infrastructural expansion and increased State funding achieved under his ministry. High artistic achievement, always unpredictable and not attributable to any policy initiative, has undoubtedly been remarkable in recent years. The work of our artists, in diverse media, is a legitimate source of national pride.
It is the job of arts policy makers to make this work available to the population at large, and to give all the children of the nation an opportunity to participate in cultural activities. On an international level, it is their job to ensure that the quite extraordinary cultural strengths of this small island are represented to best advantage at home and abroad. Several recent developments suggest that none of these things is being done quite as well as Mr Higgins and his advisers would have us believe. Internationally, there is sometimes a sense of important cultural business being conducted on a wing and prayer, with poor co ordination among the various agencies responsible. While L'Imaginaire Irlandais was set up well in advance, with adequate (if minimal) funding arrangements, the same cannot be said of the proposed Irish participation as the featured nation in the Frankfurt Book Fair next autumn.
As reported in this newspaper, much of the programme of events announced for Ireland and its Diaspora will either have to be dropped, or scaled down, if more private sponsorship is not secured at this late stage. There seems to be internal confusion as to whether the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, or the Arts Council, should be picking up part of the tab. Meanwhile, the body which does have formal responsibility for promoting Irish arts abroad, the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Foreign Affairs, is in limbo. The term of office of the previous committee expired on December 31st. While the Department claims the appointment of a new committee is "imminent", delays of several months have occurred in the past.
The urgent need for an adequately resourced agency which can professionally co ordinate big and small cultural ventures abroad has never been more evident. At home, key aspects of a strategic plan for the National Library, approved by government when it was presented in 1992, remain largely unimplemented. And the Arts Council's three year plan, endorsed by Mr Higgins and approved by Cabinet only last autumn is already short of its minimum requirements by £6 million, or 25 per cent, and is now suddenly to be stretched, in unspecified ways, over five years. These difficulties do not detract from the real achievements of the energetic Mr Higgins. But they do indicate that cultural politics may be sailing into very stormy waters, and that the high expectations raised by political rhetoric may come to grief.