Seanad debates

Wednesday, 24 May 2017

10:30 am

Photo of Fintan WarfieldFintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Members of Aosdána have criticised the Arts Council for failing to properly consult those members of Aosdána. For clarity on the issue, I refer to a letter written by Colm Tóibín to the Arts Council in which the artist makes clear that the letter is for public consumption and is not confidential. Colm Tóibín states, "I notice that the council wishes to change the definition for those artists eligible for cnuas". He goes on to state:

The Arts Council discussed the definition of 'full-time practising artist'. It was agreed to no longer use this definition. The new definition for eligible artists is 'working artists engaged in productive practice'.

He then, with great honesty, states:

While I am not seeking a cnuas, and never have sought one, I presume I am a working artist, but I have not written a single word since last November. I can't think of anything. Sentences won't come. I can't force them. I don't know when I will start write again. I do nothing most of the time. I am waiting. That is what artists do sometimes. This may be necessary. In time, I hope to get an opening paragraph, but who knows? In any case, I am not involved just now in productive practice - whatever that is (I suppose it means writing).

Colm Tóibín asks the Arts Council:

Have you seen the work the Agnes Martin produced in her nineties? Have you studied that long period in her life, when she was old, when she made no paintings at all, a period of inwardness and reflection that may have been essential for her and may have made all the difference to the work she then produced in the years before she died.

He goes on to quote the Arts Council who, "agreed that members not advanced in years but who are temporarily incapacitated due to ill health and unable to engage in 'productive practice' during the course of a cnuas five year term would have their cnuas suspended and would not be eligible to seek financial assistance via alternative measures". To the Arts Council, he draws, and I quote from him, "attention also to Patrick Kavanagh's poem 'The Hospital', which is one of the greatest Irish poems of the second half of the twentieth century. The images came to him while he was being treated for lung cancer". He than asks:

Would you really have written to him when he was stricken so, to let him know what the Arts Council had agreed? You need to remember that there have been many Directors of the Council, and there are, as you know, many ex-Directors, and many ex-Chairs, ... And this is the way it should be. But there are no ex-artists. There never have been. That is not how the imagination works. We are often silent, and indeed we may often seem to be indolent. But we don't retire.

It was also agreed by the Arts Council to produce audits of the work undertaken annual and Colm Tóibín wonders and asks whether if John McGahern, who published no novel between 1979 and 1990, had been in receipt of a cnuas, would the Arts Council "have sent 'auditors' down to Leitrim to do 'a sample audit' of what he was doing?", and whereas James Joyce produced no work between 1922 and 1939, would they have asked for sample "drafts of 'Finnegans Wake'?"

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