By Niall Gormley
Among the big ticket items announced in Leinster House as part of Budget 2024 was the news that funding of the Arts Council has reached €134 million.
That’s serious money, up from an annual €75m in 2019. Why, when there are so many competing needs, are we spending so much money on the arts? Who cares about the arts?
On Culture Night in 2022 742,000 people engaged with 1,700 events in communities across Ireland. Huge numbers attend festivals and theatres. Counties and towns celebrate their local writers and artists.
The woman whose job is to spend this money is Maureen Kennelly, Director of the Arts Council. She is based in offices, comprised of two fine Georgian houses, located about 300 meters around the back of Leinster House on Merrion Square.
A native of Ballylongford in North Kerry, she is the youngest of seven children and “grew up in a house where reading was encouraged.” North Kerry is, of course, the setting for the legendary Listowel Writer’s Festival. Could that have had any impact on her career?
“I consider that I was very lucky to grow up where I did because it was just eight miles from Listowel and the Writer’s Festival is something that I took part in as a teenager and it was a big influence on me,” she says.
The festival in turn attracted other arts groups and the Druid Theatre toured the town, introducing her to top class theatre. So arts were in the local DNA.
“I am from the same village as Brendan Kennelly (no relation) and remember seeing Brendan on the Late Late Show, he was a very regular panellist and guest at that time. It was a formative influence because you felt, ‘OK, well you can be from Ballylongford and you can be involved in the national discourse’.”
Maureen was writing poems as a teenager and she recalls that Brendan was very encouraging to her.
She went to UCD to study sociology and politics, not English she says as if she still can’t believe it. In any case, she hung around with students involved in film and theatre.
“I was involved in the UCD Drama Soc’ myself and I was writing some (not very good) poems. I attended slam poetry events in Dublin at the time, which was a kind of underground movement,” she says.
Geography again played a part in her journey when she began working in the North Inner City in Dublin. In the early 1990’s Ireland was beginning to take off economically and there was a sense of renewal in areas that had been blighted by disadvantage and dereliction.
The North Inner City was not a fashionable district but it became the setting for the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square and the James Joyce Centre in North Great George’s Street. A corner was being turned as people began to see both the value of Ireland’s cultural heritage and the fabric of Dublin’s Georgian architecture.
Maureen volunteered to work at the James Joyce Centre and came under the “fantastic influence” of Ken Monaghan, who was a nephew of the great man himself, and had been a co-founder of the Centre. She spent her weekends working there.
So what with giving her social time and her spare time to the arts, she decided to make it official by taking on an Arts Administration Higher Diploma at University College Galway.
“Dynamite” is how she describes her year in Galway. “I had an amazing university experience, with lots of like-minded souls in my class, there were just 15 of us. But it exposed us to everything Galway had to offer. We were encouraged by our teachers to get out and see things, five nights a week. And I haven’t stopped since.”
And she really hasn’t. Her profile on the Arts Council website says:
“She was previously director of Kilkenny Arts Festival, artistic director of the Mermaid Arts Centre, general manager with Fishamble Theatre Company, and she also worked with Druid Theatre Company, the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival, The Arts Council and the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland. On a freelance basis, she worked with a wide range of organisations including Theatre Forum, Sing Ireland, the Performance Corporation and Age & Opportunity. She was Primary Curator with the Mountains to Sea DLR Book Festival and Programme Director with the Cúirt International Festival of Literature.
“She was a member of the judging panel for the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for 2002 and 2006 and she chaired this panel in 2003. She has been a board member of Kilkenny Arts Festival, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the Butler Gallery, Barabbas Theatre Company and the Dock Arts Centre.”
Whew. There was more but I would probably be breaching some plagiarism law if I kept quoting. So now she’s in charge of spending the €134m of public money. What is the Arts Council?
“It is the national agency to develop and fund the arts. I guess there are two sides to what we do. One is a kind of straightforward funding process and there are organizations with whom we’ve had a very long relationship.
“At the top of the funding pile you have the Abbey Theatre and that’s in receipt this year of €8 million from us. Then you’ll have organisations that would be receiving around €20,000 or €30,000. So in all, there are probably more than 300 organizations in receipt of monies from the Arts Council.
“The other side is the individuals that receive funding. There are over 3,000 individuals that we fund and most of those are on an annual basis.”
Why fund individual artists?
“Most of the individual artists’ funding comes through what we call ‘bursaries’. So a writer will say, ‘look I need to buy time for myself. I want to work on my novel. I want to work on a book of poems. I need time to sit at the desk and actually write rather than be worried about how I’m going to earn a crust’. So that’s where funding from the Arts Council comes in particularly useful.”
Who decides what is art? One woman’s scribble is another woman’s masterpiece. There must be rational way to decide.
“We go through a very rigorous assessment process and we use what we call a ‘peer panel process’ for many of our individual artists’ awards, whereby a number of artists actually serve on an assessment panel. These are people who are working in the area themselves so they will have a lot of credibility.”
Wouldn’t that perhaps end up with the same types of people and art getting funded?
“We’re very conscious that we want to make the people whom we fund and support more representative of the population,” she says.
“So what we’re doing is surveying the people who apply to us on a regular basis to ask them about their gender, their sexuality, their socioeconomic backgrounds, their ethnicity; so that we can ask: ‘OK are we really reflecting Ireland as life is lived here today?’ That’s really important to us. This is all part of our equality, diversity and inclusion policies.”
I ask her about the Arts Council’s ideas for bringing the arts into schools and to change the situation in the past where art was an afterthought in the education system.
“It is astonishingly different now in a good way and I’m thrilled to be able to tell you that. We run a program called Creative Schools and we work with the Department of Education and Creative Ireland closely on that.
“There’s an investment of just short of three million euros going into that every year and we have been able to impact on a quarter of all schools through this Creative Schoos program. We have artists going into schools and working with school teachers on a very intensive basis to bring arts to children so I mean that is a game-changer.”
How does she know that?
“We’ve been going through lots of evaluations (by DCU) because obviously it’s a big investment on behalf of the public. The findings that have come back are extraordinarily positive in terms of the impact on children; in terms of their levels of happiness, their levels of self esteem and confidence are way, way higher as a result of participating in Creative Schools, so that’s absolutely fantastic.”
The Arts Council are also looking to extend access to the arts into the socio-economic disadvantaged areas and Maureen says that the DEIS schools make up a very high proportion of applicants for the Creative Schools program.
Finally, I ask her where all this is taking us and she points to the Booker long list this year where there were four Irish writers, all of whom received backing from the Arts Council over the years; and poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Jane Clarke made the TS Eliot Prize shortlist; and to An Cailín Ciúin, the Claire Keegan book and film that made it all the way to the Oscars.
Money well spent, it seems.
