There is a quote by Anne Enright, the prize-laden novelist, on Dublin City of Literature’s website that goes: “In other towns, clever people go out and make money. In Dublin, clever people go home and write their books.”
When Dr Pat Wallace retired as the director of the National Museum of Ireland last February, he was going home, not to write his own book, but to write our book. A distinguished gathering at his leaving do was told by Dr John O’Mahony, the museum’s chairman, that Wallace would finish writing the chronicles of the excavation of Wood Quay.
In his speech, O’Mahony said he hoped that Adrienne Corless, the archeologist collaborating with Wallace and project manager of the museum’s Dublin excavations since 2007, would have her contract renewed to facilitate the tome’s completion. Corless started working for the museum in 2004, initially concentrating on the Fishamble Street area, where Handel’s Messiah had its world premiere in 1742.
Three months since Wallace’s departure, the museum has no director and Corless has been let go because of the public-service recruitment ban. We ought to be very worried.
Wood Quay, the crucible of Viking Dublin, is one of Europe’s great heritage sites. Its unearthed secrets throw light on how our people and our capital city have evolved over 1,000 years and more. In the 1970s, stoutly principled protesters in duffle coats marched past the Coffee Inn to Dail Eireann in a vain effort to stop a gargantuan development on the site to house the city’s council offices. Imagine if they had succeeded. During the recent building boom, there would have been a visible reminder in our midst of how enduring civilisations take root and grow.
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Not content with concreting over Wood Quay, the state’s grubby fingers now threaten to snatch away the interpretative record of the archeological dig. Such are the inherent dangers when the custodianship of heritage is handed over to bean-counters. For every decision, there is a consequence.
Of course, hard choices must be made following the ruinous property boom and the collapse of the banks. When the choice facing an impoverished exchequer is, say, between hiring a paediatric intensive-care nurse or an archeologist, only the congenitally heartless would choose the latter. The drawing up of the executioner’s shortlist, though, is a choice in itself, predicated on a contest between what is vital and what is an unaffordable luxury. Therein lies the political banana skin. So far, the government has failed to provide data or rationale for the proposal to extinguish our cultural institutions’ independence. Separate boards for the National Museum of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland are recent innovations and, to a politician’s mind, may therefore be easily dismantled.
Early in this economic crisis, the mantra that emanated from the inaugural Global Irish Economic Forum at Farmleigh (the former Guinness family abode bought by the state in 1999 at an all-in cost of €52.2m) was that our illustrious arts and culture would save the day. Monetise, monetise, monetise, went the ugly catch cry. Artists, however, can be a stubborn lot, and ill-disposed to hot-housing commercially viable “product” for mass consumption. Control is of paramount importance in the relationship with hard-headed budget planners.
The first pitfall in a debate about arts governance is the demonisation by language. Those espousing lofty ideals are derided as snooty denizens of “ivory towers”. Advocates of the pragmatic approach are denounced as “barbarians at the gate” engrossed in measuring “consumer base points”. The fact is that neither side is entirely one or the other. Bureaucrats required to cut costs are not inured to the soulful benefits of good art. Likewise, the arty fraternity can be ruthlessly practical.
The Abbey theatre’s director is Senator Fiach Mac Conghail, who is one of the defenders in chief of independent arts governance. Yet the Abbey staged a cringe-inducing, drinkin’-fightin’-Irish version of Brian Friel’s Translations last summer that was shamelessly designed to part tourists from their holiday bucks.
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The eruption of tension between the two sides is refreshing after the boomtime saturation of boy bands and chick lit, held up as apogees of Irish artistic endeavour. When push comes to shove, though, cost-cutting civil servants are not likely to put value on the sheer pleasure of sitting in the National Library’s soaring reading room, or listening to historians debate the nuances of the war of independence. Preserving the seamlessness between the past and the present is of unquantifiable worth. As Professor Diarmaid Ferriter, who has resigned from the National Library board in protest, puts it: “If we lose that sense of attachment to our heritage, we are losing the essence of ourselves.”
There have been some casualties along the Wildean road of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. During the Celtic tiger, Bertie Ahern’s government cited a widely discredited civil-service estimate of restoration costs as a bar to the state acquiring Lissadell House in Sligo. As the childhood home of Constance Markievicz, Europe’s first woman government minister, and her suffragist sister Eva Gore-Booth, and as an occasional refuge for WB Yeats, the Nobel laureate poet and a founder of the Abbey, Lissadell is a landmark politico-cultural crossroads.
It was bought by Edward Walsh and Constance Cassidy for €3m and, in August 2010, Leonard Cohen invoked “the great master Yeats” when he played there to 10,000 people. The septuagenarian Canadian poet visited Yeats’s grave at Drumcliffe and wrote “sublime” in the visitors’ book. He wanted to return. A plan was hatched to have Cohen perform as part of a celebration of music, poetry and culture. The revenue for the local economy was projected at €10m.
Now we learn Cohen will not be returning to play at Lissadell after all, because the estate has been closed due a protracted right-of-way dispute between the owners and Sligo county council. There has not been a whiff of a political initiative to rescue the plan, which places a question mark over the state’s ability to “monetise” the arts. Worse, the political silence following the announcement suggests that Merrion Street fails to appreciate the cultural opportunity that has been missed.
What has happened at Lissadell is timely proof that, as long as the state is in the gutter, it needs sentries at the gate looking up at the stars.