Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

A great play begins with the following scene:

GALILEO: Put the milk on the table. But don't shut any of my books.

ANDREA [the housekeeper's son]: Mother says we must pay the milkman. If we don't, he'll soon be making a circle round our house [...]

GALILEO: The expression is: he will be describing a circle, Andrea.

ANDREA: All right. If we don't pay, he'll be describing a circle round us, Signor Galilei.

GALILEO: While the bailiff, Signor Cambione, will come straight here by taking what sort of a line between two points?

ANDREA grinning: The shortest.

The great German Communist playwright, Brecht, describes all too well in that scene the conflict between creative endeavour and economic pressure, a conflict all too familiar for artists in this country and more than many others. Artists in this country know the experience of having to duck and dive and of trying to do their art while surviving on a community employment scheme or an internship. They know the experience of having to haggle with the officer down at the local dole office to try to explain that the work they are doing is genuine work and that they should not be forced to go out and do work which cuts across that which they wish to do and invest their labour in. They know the experience of trying to find a studio they can afford.

This affects all artists but it affects, in particular, female artists. What is the median income of an artist in this country? For a man, it is the very low figure of €11,148. For a woman, it is way less at €5,982. This can be contrasted with the situation in France where payment is made by the state to artists who work more than 507 hours over a ten month period. It can also be contrasted with the situation of many of the workers artists work alongside in, for example, theatres or community centres. Builders or electricians are on higher rates of pay. There is a lesson there for the artistic community. It needs to be organised and unionised and it needs to fight. This is being done, but artists need full support when doing it.

We often talk about the great condition in this country of our writers, poets, singers and artists. Unfortunately, there is another tradition, which is a tradition of Philistinism and it is a tradition which is particularly strong in the establishment down through the years. When Yeats wrote about the people fumbling in the greasy till in "September 1913" he wrote about the shopkeeper mentality among the aspiring ruling elite at the time. Other Deputies have mentioned the establishment censorship that was imposed on artists during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. However, who stands in their tradition? Does not a Government which allocates 0.11% to the arts stand in that bad, Philistine tradition? I argue that it does. A figure of 0.3% is a step forward, but it is only half of the European average. In our modest demands in this amendment, we want the European average and we will continue to campaign and fight for it, irrespective of the vote, which we hope will be carried.

See this speech in context