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

I wish to discuss the Youth Arts Now report commissioned by the local authority arts services of Kilkenny, Carlow, Wexford and Waterford, together with Creative Ireland Waterford, and facilitated by Waterford Youth Arts. It was launched this day last week in Smock Alley Theatre. It was fantastic to see so many young artists there doing exactly what young artists should, expressing themselves, finding meaning and making art. The report provides a clear-eyed overview of the current context in the youth arts. While it fully acknowledges the increased levels of funding being made available to the arts sector under this Government, it still echoes in its introduction the finding of the National Youth Council of Ireland that the youth arts sector is still working with inadequate, inconsistent and piecemeal funding for youth arts provision set within an under-resourced youth work sector.

The report prompts us to ask what we are talking about when we talk about youth arts. Among its 19 findings, the report states that national policy is distributed across many policy sites and Departments and each Department has priorities and outcomes peculiar to itself. Consequently, youth arts as a stand-alone practice can fall between policy cracks. Youth arts is treated as an input into other policy objectives and not a sector in its own right. There is little priority given at a national level to the idea of young people as artists. The emphasis falls on personal, social and economic outcomes. Funding enters the sector from multiple sources, with different criteria. Funding is increasingly outcome-driven as opposed to rights-based, with a particular emphasis on improvements in individual well-being and tending towards targeted as opposed to universal provision and access.

Is it the case that we think youth arts should do something in order to earn its crust? It certainly can be useful to help resolve issues like social inclusion or to explore mental health difficulties. Surely youth arts also has to be a space in which there are no objectives other than for young people to have the space to make art. Chief among its ten recommendations, the report argues that the national strategic youth organisations and those working in the delivery of youth arts must collaborate on a framework national youth arts policy, built on a sector-wide agreed definition of youth arts and a vision for the development of youth arts. Are there plans afoot in the Department to do that?

I want to finish on the words of Mary, who helped launch this report. She states:

My mother signed me up for creative writing classes with Waterford Youth Arts when I was thirteen, and I hated her for it. My words were mine. I didn’t want someone to read my words and tell me that they were wrong. I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do with my words, or what to do at all. My mother signed me up for creative writing classes and it was one of the most influential moments of my life. It took a while, but when I shared my words, I found that there were no harsh critiques, there was no scorn, no side eye glances at the weird sideways girl.

I am the person I am today because of youth arts. It isn’t simply a youth club, or a school play, or some handmade posters on a wall. Youth arts is a living breathing thing. It fosters and nurtures creative self-expression, which in turn nurtures a young person into a young adult. I know I still have a lot to learn about life and myself even. But, having grown up as a veteran of youth arts, I’m not the weird sideways girl I used to be. I’m confident, and I’m brave, and I have the strength to follow the path I’ve chosen for my life, winding and bumpy as all life paths turn out to be.

Really, what more should we ask than that? We should be less focused on objectives and outcomes and more focused, in a coherent way, on creating a space where young people can authentically express themselves.

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