Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman:

Bob Geldof, in his TV programme "A Fanatic Heart", released on RTÉ for the centenary of 1916, makes this provocative suggestion:

One hundred years ago, a handful of Irishmen and women rose up against the British Empire. A six-day rebellion that ended in their execution and elevation to near-sainthood. But are they Ireland’s greatest heroes? Is the GPO Ireland’s most sacred place? To me, it represents the birth of a pious, bitter and narrow-minded version of Ireland I couldn’t wait to escape.

But there was another version of Ireland, dreamt up by a poet ... His vision was mythical, romantic, truly heroic and beautiful. That was the Ireland I could never leave behind.

Both Bob Geldof and Oliver St. John Gogarty agree. There is no Free State without Yeats, and both imply that Ireland does not exist without the arts.

Others have suggested that since the beginning of the 20th century and the founding of our Free State, we swapped British rule for three alternative colonisations: a particular brand of nationalism; a home-grown blend of Catholicism; and the prevailing western culture of scientific realism. We may agree or disagree but one thing is certain: the 21st century is a cultural tsunami that has hit the whole world and washed away most signposts and values which constituted the western world as we have known it up to now.

As we sit here now in Leinster House at the beginning of 2019, when all the "isms" of the previous century have worn thin, where do we go and to whom do we turn for a compass and a guideline on the way towards the future? It is not for me, or for anyone else for that matter, to provide a justification for art. Art needs no justification and will survive and endure even where repudiated and persecuted. The words, supposedly issuing from Nazi Germany, about reaching for a gun whenever the word "culture" is mentioned, have less dramatic and more subtle forms of asphyxiation, which are more regularly applied.

In the ten minutes allotted, I will give at least one good reason art in this country must be supported and promoted at all costs. We cannot leave the future of Ireland to politicians alone. Our great dilemma is that we are trying to prepare ourselves for a world which we will never be able to forecast. Only imagination can help us to prepare for the future. How could any of us who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s have prepared ourselves for the world of text, Twitter and tweet? The future is not something we step into as an already designed space. The future is ourselves as we choose to become. The future is alive with possibility to the extent that we are open to change. Change occurs most profitably in the wake of fundamental shifts in our way of being and these occur mostly because someone has imagined and described them. Works of art are the first hints we get, and artists are there to harvest possible shapes for the future and to sketch in outline what we might become.

The future is in our hands. Obviously, there are forces working, influences abounding and pressures surrounding, which diminish our autonomy and lessen our responsibility. However, it is still possible for those of us who live on this island as we approach the third decade of the 21st century to shape our future within the limitations and constrictions which global membership of the universe imposes. There are many imperatives and considerations which should determine the steps we take, but prominent among these should be the voice of artists and the educating influence of art. It is not the only factor but it should be a decisive one. Art can provide an accurate and unflinching cardiograph of the present and a prognosis of possibilities for the future, and politicians and leaders ignore this at their peril.

There may have been other times in history when truth was made available through politics, religion or philosophy, but these grand narratives have been found wanting. Nowadays, we have to rely on sleuths with a keen sense of smell. Artists are the best trackers that we have got. Art is a secret logic of the imagination which subverts actual worlds in the name of possible worlds. The artist may not even be aware of what is happening through their work. In certain cases he or she is used as a mouthpiece for the psychic secrets of the times in which they live. Art of the future has no template, no guide and no intellectual categories; it feels its way forward, finding words beyond the vocabulary of any language we currently know how to speak.

A dialogue must happen between artists and the rest of us. Others do not have the sensitivity, the authenticity or the flair for capturing the originality we need but others have to build the future. We are those others so, in whatever way and to whatever extent is possible, we must become aware of the direction in which the trailblazers are pointing. That does not mean we all have to be artists. It does not mean even that we have to appreciate art ourselves.

What it means is that someone has to produce the appropriate work of art and that our sociocultural ambience has to become infused with the understanding that such art inspires so that whatever movement we take forward, whatever way we instigate the future, whatever way we are energised or directed, we must be informed by the spirit of that art that shapes the space which should cleared for us towards the future.