Thursday, May 14, 2020

Coronavirus arts measures: The Culture Ministry is a carriage waiting to turn into a pumpkin

Bewley's Café Theatre is the first venue to be seriously impacted by the pandemic. Photo: Bewley's

Earlier this year, during arts hustings for the general election, Culture Minister Josepha Madigan was asked to defend her department’s arts spending. Research by the National Campaign for the Arts in recent years has shown that Ireland’s culture investment is the lowest in Europe.

“The arts are the Cinderella at the table, and to secure any funding in that context was extremely difficult,” she said. 

It was a telling insight that confirmed what many suspected. The cabinet table views arts and culture as frivolous, grounded in unreality, its workers not engaging in “real” work. A Culture Minister might make a fool of themself by challenging budgetary decisions by the Department of Finance, for highlighting how meagre the culture spending is compared to the European average. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Culture Minister has allocated €500,000 in arts measures - in the bizarre form of digital art bursaries, not in supports for COVID-impacted institutions and workers to recover their losses. The National Campaign for the Arts quickly admonished the move, saying the measures don’t acknowledge the financial damage done to professional practice. The Campaign called for the establishment of a stabilisation fund, and an additional €20m investment in the Arts Council in 2020. That was over a month ago, and not an extra cent has been spent.

The arts measures in Ireland have been oblivious to those introduced elsewhere. A few days after that press conference, the Culture Minister posted a photo on Twitter of herself attending a video meeting with other culture ministers in the European Union. “I proposed ring-fencing a percentage of funding introduced to fight COVID-19 for the cultural and creative sector,” she said. 

It’s awkward to imagine the Culture Minister sharing an update about her €500,000 investment during that meeting. Was Monika Grütters on the call, the German minister who retrieved €50 billion for an arts aid package? Or Franck Reister, the French minister who since secured special unemployment benefits for artists until July 2021? 

An Irish Times editorial was right in saying that the problem with the Culture Ministry lay at the cabinet table, where it is perceived as a “trainee brief for new ministers.” Condescended to rather than treated with serious responsibility, its potential has become motionless, except as a carriage ride into upper government.  

That stagnancy may be about to cost us dearly. Last week, the permanent closure of Bewley’s Café in Dublin, due to the impact of the pandemic, has left Bewley’s Café Theatre homeless. A premiere venue for high-quality plays, it is often unafraid to stir lunchtime audiences, with neglected Tennessee Williams dramas and contemporary plays by Malaprop Theatre and DC Moore among its productions. 

The worry is that during the Culture Ministry’s current inactivity, more culture institutions and workers will find if unviable to hold onto business. Arts Council surveys of funded organisations and individual artists have found that over €12.75m in invested activities and forecasted profits has been lost. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has identified arts and entertainment as one of the sectors most affected by the shutdown.

A new advisory panel for the Arts Council is expected to detail a financial aid package in the coming weeks, but it’s difficult to be hopeful when the Culture Minister hasn’t even implemented the funding increases in her own Culture 2025 document. It would be a despairing thing for stretches of the arts sector to disappear because too many of its workers are financially damaged. If that happens, it will be on the Culture Ministry’s shoulders. The gilded carriage will transform into a pumpkin.

Nothing will change unless the Culture Minister takes a stand at the cabinet table. 

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