Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Too Little, Too LateAuthor(s): Robert O'ByrneSource: Fortnight, No. 298 (Sep., 1991), pp. 36-37Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25553062 .

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Core

question THE APPOINTMENT of two new faces, Chris

Bailey and Una McCarthy, to the helm of

Belfast's main arts centres, the Crescent and

the Old Museum building, is a timely coinci

dence and, hopefully, will encourage a basic

question to be asked at City Hall.

Is it time for Belfast City Council to estab

lish a coherent, long-term, arts policy, and to

recognise the importance of a strong, secure,

infrastructure for community arts?

Belfast is the only city in the UK where the

municipal arts centres are not given 'core

funding' (covering wages, heating and so on)

by the local council. It is also out of line with

other councils in Northern Ireland where, de

spite political divisions, centres for cultural

celebration and expression are clearly valued.

Newry and Mourne Arts Centre, for exam

ple, receives core funding from the town hall;

in Derry the Orchard Gallery has sustained its

impressive record in both community arts and

as an exhibition space on the basis of generous and continuous support from the city council.

And the story is echoed at Flowerfield Arts Centre (Coleraine), Ardhowen Theatre

(Enniskillen), Downpatrick Arts Centre and

Harmony Hill Arts Centre (Lisburn).

From Seattle to Glasgow, the benefits of a

proactive policy towards the arts are widely

recognised. And it is accepted that support must be given, not only to sexy, one-off events,

but to maintenance of a healthy infrastructure.

In Belfast, both the Crescent and the Old

Museum have been a focus for creative en

ergy. And they have made a significant contri

bution towards raising the profile and enhanc

ing the identity of their respective areas.

Belfast City Council did once provide core

funding for the Crescent. This came to an end

in the mid-80s, in the wake of a proposed road

widening scheme?eventually cancelled?

which threatened the centre's future.

Today, the council follows a policy of

'sponsoring' events it believes will reflect

well on City Hall?the Ulster Orchestra and

the Belfast Festival, for instance. Like a lot of

sponsorship, it is short-term. A token gesture towards some sense of moral responsibility, this is a cop-out from establishing a coherent,

long-term policy. The Crescent and the Old Museum are

sponsored in this way. The problem is that the

council has no statutory responsibility to fund

the arts?as it does to maintain standards of

environmental health, for instance.

To be fair, Belfast City Council is stuck with the highest rates in Northern Ireland, and

some massive bills to pay. Its hands, if not

tied, are constrained.

The institutionalised celebration of sweat

ing and grunting in leisure centres costs ?8

million annually to run, while the Parks De

partment consumes some ?11 million?leav

ing only a few hundred thousand for the arts.

H^Hi rf- ^ ;'i;i^H^^^HI^^^^^H f;fl

The leisure centres, once gleaming solutions

to civic tension, are now an uncomfortable

millstone hampering other developments?

they get 20 times more support than the arts.

So who carries the can for core funding? The Arts Council does. The Department of

Education's Capital Programme for the Arts

has facilitated the development of both Bel

fast centres. But the core funding is supported

by the Arts Council through its community arts budget.

This is unique in the UK. The Arts Council is effectively carrying the can for Belfast City

Council. Yet Arts Council money, particu

larly in community arts, is most appropriately and productively spent in programming.

The Crescent and the Old Museum, con

trary to some perceptions, do not overlap with

each other, pointlessly competing over events.

The Crescent, with a lot of small, intimate,

spaces, has pursued a policy of responding to

community needs and nurturing participation. It is now in the middle of an ambitious expan sion programme and there are plans for a cafe,

bookshop, performance space and cinema.

The Old Museum, in contrast, with more

generous spaces, has become a vibrant centre

for alternative and experimental performance

work, and is now the home of a handful of

energetic young companies, including the thea

tre company Tinderbox. In the absence of a

studio space at the Lyric, the Old Museum is

filling an important gap and has hosted a string of impressive productions.

Both centres are entering new chapters, under new directors, and are in good health.

Belfast City Council has a great opportunity to

recognise their importance to the cultural life

of the city and secure their future by providing some committed, long-term, core funding.

It would be money well spent on the arts

infrastructure and, in the absence of a full

time arts officer for the council, a step towards

a positive and coherent policy. It would also

be an act of faith in the youth of Belfast who

prefer to create rather than destroy.

Incidentally, the latest estimate of the cost

of the city council's projected concert hall/

conference centre is some ?30 million. Which,

given the current allocations, would fund the

arts in Belfast for the next 60 years.

Idublin

ci99i:

ROBERT O'BYRNE analyses the latest dust-up over

Dublin 1991 ...

Too little,

too late

IF ANYTHING could be predicted about Dub lin's year as European City of Culture (Fort

night 289), it was that the event would inspire a torrent of criticism from the native popula tion. True to form, the latest noisy wave has

washed over Dublin 1991 's organisers. This time, the denunciations have come

from the newly-appointed cultural committee

of Dublin City Council. Its voluble members

must give heart to the many Cassandras, or

begrudgers as they are properly called, who

have been contentedly decrying the whole oc

casion ever since it was first proposed. Of course, the very idea of a cultural year

allocated to different European cities deserves

an award for bureaucratic silliness. EC direc

tives of this kind should be discredited with a well-aimed raspberry. However, if they are

espoused, then they at least merit generous and

wholehearted support. What Dublin 1991

proves once again is that government assist

ance for cultural activity in the republic comes

too little and too late. Hence the consistent

complaint that the event has been underfunded.

This, together with criticisms of poor pub

licity and exclusion of local communities,

formed the substance of the city councillors'

objections at a special meeting called last month.

The director of Dublin 1991, Lewis Clohessy, has been censured many times before on the

same points, and his responses had an under

standably mechanical ring.

Certainly, the publicity has not always been

good enough, with poor press liaison a consist

ent feature. The organisers claim to have spent

approximately ?250,000 on publicity at home and the same amount abroad. Nonetheless,

many events, such as the Festival of Discovery last spring and the Mayday to Bloomsday thea

tre festival, failed to generate the expected excitement. Claims by some councillors that

the whole year had so far gone unnoticed by

36 SEPTEMBER FORTNIGHT

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Dublin's citizens seem to imply mass illit

eracy, however: it has been very easy to find out

what is happening on a daily basis.

What the year has lacked to date is not a

programme or publicity. The trouble is that

both of these have failed to capture the public attention needed to give Dublin 1991 real im

pact. Absurd comparisons have been made in

favour of the 1988 Millenium celebrations, but

anyone whose memory can stretch back three

years will realise that Dublin 1991 is affected

by a similar series of problems. Both then and

now, for example, the organising body lost

senior personnel in mid-term?if Dublin 1991

has recently seen the resignation of three ex

ecutives, the Millennium changed director half

way through its year.

Similarly, both occasions had to suffer the

criticism of excessive dependence upon an

existing programme of events, bolstered by a

few prestige galas accessible to the wealthy alone. It is hard to see how things could be

otherwise. Should Dublin 1991 have insisted

upon the cancellation of this year's theatre

festival or ignored the Mozart bicentenary, so

that it could shine in solitary splendour? With

out the regular cultural circuit to fall back on,

Dublin 1991 would have been a very small and

not very bright light.

Blaming its organisers for the diminutive

scale of the celebrations is misplaced. The

problem from the start was governmental tardi

ness?in agreeing to accept 1991 for Dublin, in

appointing a body to run the occasion, in allo

cating funds. Programming decisions were

constantly delayed because the scale of the

government's financial contribution was only

finally announced late last autumn.

This had the effect of making Dublin 1991

dependent upon commercial sponsors?who

plan their budgets far in advance and who, for

the right package, are willing to provide gener ous assistance. But small community groups do not attract the attention of large commercial

bodies; the latter are interested in self-promo tion. If Dublin City Council and the govern

ment did not want Dublin 1991 to be a blend of the same hardy annuals and a handful of gala events, they should have provided much more

generous funding at a much earlier date.

In a well argued piece recently, the Irish

Times columnist Fintan O'Toole described

Dublin 1991 as a "nightmarish combination of

half-baked privatisation and bureaucratic iner

tia". Unhappily, the same remark could be

made about almost every aspect of Irish cul

tural life. In this respect, Dublin 1991 is en

tirely typical and, like the criticisms it has

engendered, utterly predictable.

ATH CLIATH

s1991 '

The tall ships proved bigger than any indigenous attraction

... while JAN ASH DOWN says hype stole the Belfast show

Too tall a story

IT'S A LITTLE ironic that in the year of Dublin's cultural excess some eyes should be turning

enviously northwards to the 1991 Best of Belfast celebrations.

No one in the north quite knew what was the logic that lay behind this designation of a year as one for 'a party'. Some thought that it was a slightly naughty attempt to ensure that Dublin did

not get all the attention; others, more cynically, read it as politically motivated and self

congratulatory?if you tell the people of Belfast they are wonderful, and living in a wonderful

place, they might actually start to believe it.

The fact that 1991 was only for Belfast created a problem from the start. It's often levied at

the city?doubtless at Dublin as well?that it gets the major slice of any money going and is thus

able to dominate culturally. Yet so much of the north, and indeed the south, isn't urban at all?

almost immediately there were rumblings from Derry, Newry and Enniskillen.

If these were paralleled in Galway, Waterford and Sligo, at least Dublin could claim precedent. The concept ofthe European city of culture isn't bounded by the city itself: it's intended to embody the wider culture, whether that be a region?as last year with Glasgow?or a nation state. The idea

is that the whole cultural context should be enhanced by having its core city thus designated. In Belfast, however, things were to be more parochial. While large sums were set aside to

provide an expensive commercial 'tone' for the year, the thinking was very much within city limits. Organised by a board composed of civil servants and businessmen, amiably headed by Ivor

Oswald, the planning for Belfast 1991 started well in advance, but with little clear idea as to how

to make this a truly communal event. If the cynics' doubts were to be confounded, some very clear

concepts would have been needed to demonstrate purity of intent.

But alas the same old Belfast patterns emerged and the approach seemed entirely top-down, rather than any true attempt to generate the event from within the community itself. Three sub

committees were formed in a fairly ad hoc manner to look after the financial allocations to

sporting, community, and arts and entertainment projects. The neat divisions themselves are

perhaps revealing of the unthought-out nature ofthe approach. Did anyone consider funding by communal area, say, rather than by category of event?

With public relations and advertising commanding a large and yet larger part of the overall

budget as the year proceeded, cuts in support for arts and community events added fuel to the

critical fire that the Best of Belfast was more hype than reality. The commercial did little to help. While it was clearly good to use the media to raise public awareness, the concept was

disastrously shallow, creating an ad man's happy-happy world of high kicks and jolly songs. In

the light of the last two weeks of August in the north, this image seems more than usually

inappropriate. Had the idea ofthe year been more firmly rooted within the community in the first

place, such large sums spent on publicity would have been obviated.

It's too soon to make final judgments on the year, but it's another unavoidable irony that the

one event which has so far attracted massive community attention was the one that came in on the

wind?in the shape of the tall ships. Anyone who saw them parading sail on the final day will

remember 1991 all right?but its connections with the Best of Belfast are more than tenuous.

It's a pity there couldn't have been more events which excited the community with a sense that

something was happening. After all, it's the involvement ofthe guests that makes a party?or not, as the case may be.

FORTNIGHT SEPTEMBER 37

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