Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Like many of us, I suspect, when we heard the sad news of the passing of Derek Mahon over the weekend I went to the bookshelf and pulled out a book to reacquaint myself with some of his beautiful and lyrical work. In reading "An Bonnán Buí" two lines jumped out at me:

the whole unfortunate country frozen over

and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety --

Those words really strongly resonate with the country at the minute, coming into the winter with increased Covid restrictions. Our towns and cities are increasingly locked down and quietened and how much we miss those stilled voices of our performing arts sector, who are among those most acutely affected by this pandemic and the public health measures it has necessitated. While we know that Covid-19 has had a profound impact across all of our society it is true to say that some sectors have borne the brunt of the storm while others have been relatively sheltered. Even within the arts community, there are those who have been able to continue their praxis – writers can write, painters can paint – but those within the performing arts have seen not just their income but their career progression and their artistic expression come to a dead halt. It is not just the performers who have been impacted. All the other professions that stand behind theatre, dance or live music, from sound engineers to set designers, are also at a standstill. Venues and festivals have been doing their best to push water uphill. The organisers of the Imagine Arts festival in Waterford, for example, were doing all within their power to have some live audience component in their upcoming programme, but the change this week in public health advice may well have put paid to those plans.

Two things come to me on this. The first is that in processing and comprehending the emotional impact of the pandemic; the grief of lives lost, of relationships sundered and the legacy of anxiety and isolation, it will be to the arts community that we turn. They are the lens through which we view ourselves as a society, and they are never so important as when society is in upheaval. The second is that artists want to create. While all workers should be rewarded for their work, for performing artists there is an impulse to perform that goes beyond the understanding of a traded wage economy. I would ask the Minister to consider this resource, a most human resource, that currently stands as a "country frozen over", and consider how their creative impulse can be harnessed in this changed reality. There exists a great opportunity to leverage their skills and ability by using our funding of arts and culture in the coming months to commission, to record and to archive. I refer the Minister to some of the past great projects such as the Doegen Records Web Project preserving sound recordings of native Irish dialects, or RTÉ’s "Beckett on Film" of 2001. There have been times when we have chosen to invest in the national archive and to lay down for future generations a record of the current cultural or social context of our times. The Minister should make this one of those times. She should consider investing in composers, playwrights and performers during this period. She should allow our creative artists to create and the supporting industries to support. She should allow our social historians to record those stories and voices which may be fading away on our island. She should allocate resources to the National Archives, both to organise what already exists and to add to that great store. I doubt I will be alone in quoting Derek Mahon again to close, "The sun rises in spite of everything". At some future point, we will look back on this time of Covid. With the Minister's help, and I know she has a massive interest in and deep understanding of this sector, let us hope that we will still have a functioning arts community that will help us to look back and make sense of it all.

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