Let culture out - Village Magazine



a ‘faux logo’ to be placed on cultural acts

that take place without the beneﬁt of public

funding.

Grass-roots culture needs the investment

and trust of top-down national arts and cul-

tural institutions if it is to operate eﬀectively.

The state has a duty to cherish and nourish

community culture particu-

larly in areas experiencing

poverty. These community

activities are typically imper-

vious to institutional forms of

outreach. Nonetheless they

are sites of real creativity.

This duty on the state

includes respecting and

resourcing the cultural lives of

these communities not simply

as audiences but as creators,

producers, commentators,

critics and decision-makers.

The failure to do this is where

the real crisis lies in the arts

and culture ﬁeld.

Community Culture, a Blue

Drum initiative, has set about

seeking a new status for this

‘culture’ that oﬃcial Ireland

does not recognise and, in

particular, for its value in

building resilient communi-

ties. Through working with

community-led platforms in

Limerick, Cork and Dublin, we

want to revalue the creativity

of communities.

We will need a comprehensive diagnosis

of the issues if we are to open up reasonable

and fruitful discourse about culture. It is, as

Bernard Lonergan a Canadian philosopher

suggests, about convincing each other “to

change the objects that command our respect,

hold our allegiance, ﬁre our loyalty”.

Ed Carroll is a director of Blue Drum, www.

bluedrum.ie

The state

must respect

and resource

the cultural

lives of poor

communities

not simply as

audiences but

as creators,

producers,

commentators,

critics and

decision-

makers

“

ECENT editions of Village have pre-

sented a gloomy diagnosis from

Mannix Flynn of the administra-

tion of arts and culture. He has

highlighted real failures. Certainly there has

been a swallowing of funding and creativity

by administrators. However, the accountabil-

ity yardstick proposed, focusing on funding,

is not radical enough, particularly in a con-

text where human and cultural rights are ever

downgraded. What comes to mind is an obser-

vation by Franz Fanon, “Let us try to create

the whole person, whom Europe has been

incapable of bringing to triumphant birth”.

In general, much discussion about culture

is self-referential and cut oﬀ from the many

children, adults and communities that are

simply deprived of any means of participat-

ing fully in the creative life of Ireland.

These are perilous times for groups trying

to redeﬁne culture and spread it widely. TEAM

Educational Theatre has just announced its

closure. This follows a ﬁve year saga of awk-

ward negotiations with the Arts Council to

renew the basis for its funding. The pattern

of closure has become familiar. City Arts in

Dublin and the Belltable in Limerick have also

been forced to close. Does it have to be this

way? Could another process of mediation

have not been found to save these organisa-

tions that were so central to the creativity of

local communities?

There is the example of the

Ballymun Axis Arts Centre. It

went into crisis in  and

closed. At that time, City Arts

Centre was invited by the centre’s

advisory group and Ballymun

Regeneration Limited (BRL) to

assist in re-establishing Axis.

City Arts led the negotiations

with BRL to create the ground

for the re-establishment of

Axis. An intensive process pro-

duced real fruit. By , Axis

had recruited a team of three

full-time arts programmers and

had its core funding guaranteed

by BRL.

As Mannix Flynn says, we

need to acknowledge that

administration should not drive

culture. A recent EU Expert Task

Group highlighted that the chal-

lenge in the arts is located on the

‘demand side’ (among citizens)

not on the ‘supply side’ (among

arts organisations). What we

require are new irrigation chan-

nels that revalue the people (artists and non

artists) and their creativity and the many sur-

prising places from which culture emerges.

This challenge is being addressed, albeit

still in a ﬂedgling way, outside the main-

stream arts and culture administration in

Ireland. The Professional Limerick Artists

Network has identiﬁed “a crisis in the arts

in Limerick”. It has called for practical local

actions in support of artists and communi-

ties. Community-led voices, like the Creative

Communities network in Limerick and the

creative communities initiative supported

by the Galway Community Arts Network, are

pooling their ideas and energies for local co-

operation in enabling local creativity. Édaín

O’Donnell and Donal O’Kelly have proposed

Let culture out

The challenge is about redeﬁnition and community

dispersion more than ﬁnancial accountability. By Ed Carroll

Bell tolled

CULTURE

REPLY TO

Mannix Flynn