There were many surprising and infuriating aspects to the Arts Council’s announcement yesterday, in which it sketched out how it spent €6.675m and then wrote off €5.3m on a new grants management system that never worked, but few satisfactory explanations.

As the editor of a publication that is funded by the Arts Council, I know its IT system well. For years I have waded through its complexity – you find out about grants on one website, upload your information to another, and then draw down your funding on a third. If anyone was ever asked to improve it – and as far as I can see the arts community was not asked for its feedback – the answer would be simple: scrap and simplify.

Which is what they tried to do it seems, but what a calamity. There are a number of things that will vex the music and arts community: firstly, every cent of the €6.675m spent on ‘substandard work’ and a system that was ‘not fit for purpose’ was hard won through campaigning. Nothing comes easy in the arts. Irish artists dealt with a decade of cuts and stagnation after the economic crash, and then suddenly there was a new appreciation of them during Covid-19 and things started to improve. Now the Arts Council may have blown that good will amongst the public – and certainly among politicians.

The second thing that was extraordinary was that there were no resignations. The €5.3m write-off is almost the total annual grant for Irish National Opera; it is almost five times the funding for the Irish Traditional Music Archive; it is the funding for twenty arts centres for a year. Consider also that the William Kennedy Piping Festival announced last week that it was closing after thirty years because of funding difficulties. It was never a client of the Arts Council, but it should have been. There is always enough money for advisers and contractors, but never enough for those on the ground. Many other organisations received funding cuts in recent times or their funding has stagnated for years. The idea that over six million could be whittled away while artists, festivals and organisations tried to make ends meet is appalling.

This is the Arts Council’s ‘RTÉ moment’ and it is essential that serious change follows. It has become too reliant on ill-fitting forms, confusing data collection, and vague surveys leading to general policies, for making its decisions. There is not enough engagement with people who work in the arts and who have to survive on these grants. It is possible that staff are so caught up with applications that they struggle to find the time to think and talk about the bigger issues, but that is a challenge that management should have tackled by now, regardless of what IT system there is. Every organisation has to do that. Certainly, artists do!

The Arts Council has also failed to deal with the most essential issue of all, which is the low income of artists. Catherine Martin at least could see that this was a pivotal issue and launched the Basic Income for the Arts pilot, but how confident do we feel now that that will continue? It is difficult to know what kind of thinking will take place in the Department of Arts, with a new Minister, as a result of this debacle.

What was notable about Minister O’Donovan’s statement yesterday was that he has not only commissioned an external review of the Council’s governance and culture, but that it will ‘extend not only to capital projects but to all activities and expenditures under the remit of the Arts Council’ (my italics). This could mean anything, from administrative costs to the responsibilities of the Arts Council itself, but regional distribution of funding may be a part of it too. A large proportion of the Council’s largest funding pot, Strategic Funding, is allocated to Dublin. This means it is difficult to build a sustainable arts infrastructure in the rest of the country. The result is dead towns and villages and dereliction, and every rural politician knows it. Almost all of the members of the Council are based in Dublin and there are few artists among them.

What can the Arts Council do? It needs to decide on a new path, where engagement with artists and audiences throughout the country is the priority of staff, not wading through forms. It needs to help music and the arts grow, through talking to organisations and listening. If it wants a simpler IT system, ask the people who write the applications to design it, not contractors. It would not only be simple, but accurate and reliable, freeing minds up for creativity, not more controversy.

–

Subscribe to our newsletter.