Swings and round the bend

We are constantly reminded in life that our journey can be a mixture of uphill challenges and downhill gambols, swings and roundabouts. And it seems that life mimics art or at least arts funding currently. For 43 organisations it’s definitely become even more difficult not only to access resources but to sustain the journey. For seven of those organisations, it seems that the road ahead is very unclear and some may find the final destination sooner than thought. For the rest, the holding pattern that has been locked in for the last five years means that any ambition has to be assessed so accurately that no risk can be contemplated and every creative action constrained with abject anxiety.Tough!

Where to? 

 

 

There is no clear direction for the arts. With this funding decision the only discernible trend that I can plot is a line moving down a graph, pointing to less and less and rapidly approaching an axis labelled £0.

Of course for many who don’t believe in public subsidy let alone notions of society or public benefit, the fact that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland have implemented these cuts, handed down from the Department for Communities, will be applauded. For these free marketeers, acolytes of some skewed Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest, the communities that find themselves furthest from the honey pot of the elite and the patricians, will forever get the least. In N Ireland, where 1 in 4 children live in absolute poverty, and one in four pensioners do likewise, their chances to enjoy their universal right to participate in the cultural life of this place have just been hammered again. 

And, if anything has been further underlined in all these mixed messages, particularly those emanating from the chair of ACNI despite his bluff and bluster about commerciality and business acumen, it’s that the arts can only survive with public subsidy – just look at the list of high profile organisations and the proportion of all funding that they require. Just 3 of them command close to one third of all annual funding. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t get that money, far from it they should probably get more and would if they were located elsewhere. I’m insisting that another 97 organisations need more than 66% of whatever is left! In other words, we need far greater levels of investment in the arts.

As of now, after these cuts, every person living in Northern Ireland, citizen or subject, receives just one penny per day from voted-for funds, ie those monies coming from government. That is not only the smallest amount per head in these islands but it is less than half that enjoyed by people in the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Wales or England. Against this mammoth disparity, how can the arts really hope to survive in Northern Ireland?

I, as an advocate for the arts, have often been chided and advised not to talk about well-being or to compare the plight of arts cuts with those of cuts to education or health. But we can rest assured that if our health budget in Northern Ireland was less than half the average of anywhere else in these islands, that at least our politicians would bang the drum, fight, lobby, meet representatives and officials and insist that such a situation could not be allowed to continue and that it was in our own collective interest to fight agitate for fair funding. Northern Ireland thankfully does enjoy higher per capita spend on health than anywhere else in these islands. Many would argue that had we made tough decisions around reports like Bengoa, progressing new systematic changes, then we would see even greater impact from the level of funding that we receive. Similarly there are arguments made around the structure of our education system and the provision of local schools with differing class sizes and levels of achievement. In this instance many have argued over the years that a more concerted arrangement of provision to respond to need would enable those struggling at the bottom of league tables and in more marginalised areas to be better supported and see the inequality between achievers and others reduced. All this is normally the function of publicly funded interventions.

For the arts community generally, all but a handful of organisations have been pared back year after year making themselves incredibly lean and efficient in their management of the scarce resource of funding. We have argued time and again that without increased investment the only way was down. For some now, that has almost immediate consequences; for others a stay of execution perhaps or for the very few some additional funds that undoubtedly will not even match the aspirations and ambitions to which those organisations dedicate themselves.

Strategic?

But without an overarching statement of ambition, a strategy for the Arts here, produced and supported by our administration or at least what passes for it in terms of our technocrats in the Department for Communities and the silent legislature on the Hill, we are left, or rather ACNI is left, shuffling the pieces of a jigsaw around in a zero sum funding game. And the image that we are left with is a cubist nightmare where nothing quite fits together and the overall appearance is haphazard and lacking all form and function. This is a mess.

It is deeply regrettable but the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has had to make these cuts. It’s regrettable indeed that they had to make any but their hand has been forced in that regard. If ACNI had passed on a “salami slice” cut of 5.2%, everybody would’ve quite understood that they had little option but to do so, and got on with less.

But instead, the Arts Council have elected to make “strategic” cuts where the logic and design is difficult to understand and not discernible in any strategic document to which any arts organisation can make reference. Therefore the rationale behind these decisions becomes difficult to know and the direction of travel for discrete policy areas within the management of arts resources becomes even more oblique.

And the impact of all of this, despite the “delight” that the chairman of the Arts Council expresses in this AFP funding settlement, is that each and every citizen of Northern Ireland is today worse off, culturally, with no hope of matching the access that is enjoyed anywhere else in these islands.

These are dark days for political institutions in Northern Ireland in any case but now a longer shadow has fallen on those institutions that have created so much optimism, dynamism and collective ambition for our collective notions of shared and better futures here. 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, to the day, whilst we may continue to wrangle about the direction of political settlement, the Arts and Cultural sector has become a casualty of our inability to govern ourselves and propel us to a better place. 

2018/19	Amount	Per Capita
		Per Year	Per Week	Per Day
AFP Exchequer	£8,573,382.00	£4.63	£0.09	£0.01
AFP Lottery	£4,535,796.00	£2.45	£0.05	£0.01
Total	£13,109,178.00	£7.08	£0.14	£0.02

Pennies

While inquiries probe the billions risked in heating schemes, other costs are being counted, in pennies. And our ambitions for our wee corner of the world? The fact that 6,000 jobs were maintained in this sector, underpinning our evening economy, our tourist offering, never mind what it contributes to our schools, our community spaces, even nursing homes and hospitals, can we really not spare more than 1p per day from exchequer funding?

Are we really not worth more than tuppence ha’penny?

STOP THE CUTS

FIND THE MONEY

FUND THE ARTS

Betwixt and Between

So, its been a while since I wrote my blog. I have been dumbfounded, spellbound and held in suspense by the sheer volume of political and social changes that seem to be sweeping society. And in an ever-shrinking globalised media-space, it seems that our lives are more inextricably amplified in the experiences of others than ever before.  Amidst all the clamour of new presidents, new (but hardly fresh) elections, Supreme Court rulings, ash, cash, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, we find ourselves where we have always been and this is the way it is.

For a moment in every day, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a parallel universe, where the boundaries of one time continuum have let slip and somehow tv pundits are presidents and ruling by decree is no longer the preserve of a monarch.

We don’t have to look too far to understand the surreality, whether cash for ash, or promoting the stability of democratic institutions by having elections after only one year, or parking a new agreement before it really got started – a Fresh Stop perhaps.

In all this, in the arts, there are a few certainties among all this incertitude. The daily assault on our humanity, whether the plight of refugees, here and abroad, especially the challenge facing the 80,000 children displaced by conflict in the Middle East, fears of famine in sub-Saharan Africa, the precarity of the lives of the working poor across the developed and developing world and indeed, those JAM, just about managing, the growing inefficacy of our medical challenges to infections and disease, the rising threat from racism, sexism, paternalism… a dreadful and growing list of topics for all artists to try to assist making sense of. And against all this, where are our arts when we need them most? When we need to be transported in imagination and challenged to renew layers of empathy and understanding, where are the sense-makers, the challenge takers…the artists? They are here, although it seems that the direct flight to Berlin (and perhaps a cool wind that begins with “Br” and ends in “exit”) may account for an increasing exodus. Our arts health check, although it appears that more organisations are supporting more audiences and participants than ever before, are increasingly doing so with ever increasing uncertainty and rising deficits. The mercury is hitting the red and we are running some big risks as a sector. Where we have tried to diversify our funding and indeed, revenue streams, we have been in the main quite successful but the cost has been doing more, probably for less. With these narrowing margins come less risk-taking, so actually meeting the challenge to make sense of the craziness of the world, becomes more problematic. Ironic isn't it. And it must be remembered that the only measure that the government really wants to assess is the ability of the arts to count more bums on seats – not more well-being, or greater socio-economic advantage, or educational attainment or whatever – just greater levels of participation and engagement.  So once again, where the most nuanced, flexible and capable component in a society’s tool-kit for creative and intellectual change-making is available, we only see the arts as making up the numbers.

But the real and pressing fear for many if not all publicly funded arts organisations is knowing that they can deliver greater numbers but that requires greater budgets. In all the development of the Programme for Government (the draft of the last Assembly’s version might be ready for the next one – if that can ever rise from the ashes of the recent fall out ) – greater efficiencies were simultaneously called for, albeit with increasing participation. In a period of direct rule, whilst we are in an  interregnum, between Assemblies, the bloc grant is not offered in its entirety – only 90% is budgeted to be released. If that reality is shared across all government departments and expenditures, its stands to reason that the arts will see a cut of that order. Depending on the prevailing wisdom, it could be more or indeed less. In any case, I cannot foresee any situation where there will be a penny more – not even thinking about some of the deficits that taxpayers here will have to fire-fight along the way.

The arts as a sector has always been operating in the spaces between – it is here where the tensions and frictions, the nuance and overlaps, the dialogue and space for debate and experimentation resides. But, whilst these precarious spaces become more prevalent, the ability of the arts to respond has become more constrained. So, between the canvassers calling to your door and the messages constantly quoted in the media, when you’re approached for your vote and asked what you value - what are your burning issues – you might consider a few things:

Revenue funding of the arts has now dipped into the single digit millions – where less than 10 years ago, the ask was £26M, this year, revenue funding for the arts will have dwindled to less than £9M (where a mile of new motorway costs on average £30m, according to the Highways Agency)

Between our neighbouring states to the south and the east, there is a massive gulf between how culture is valued and supported. Annually, over €200M goes the arts in the Republic of Ireland and in Scotland over £150M (€175M). There are 4.5 million in RoI and 5.3M people in Scotland – for us to have parity of per capita spend, we’d need to see €68M or £58M – that’s £49M more than we get –  or about 2 years' RHI overspend at current quoted rates.

Comparing the annual, year-round expenditure in our health and social services sector amounts to the total spend on our arts sectoral health, we spend £150 per second on health and less than 28p on the arts. 

And when we ask our young people to imagine a better future here, when we seek to support our increasingly ageing population to live more valued and rewarding lives, to chart a new industrially creative opportunity for us all to thrive within, to reinvigorate our educational system to cope with new and diverse technologies and populations, how will our political parties respond? 

We need to ask them, to recognise that educational, creative and mental health and our artistic expressiveness, our need to be entertained and to perform and communicate and celebrate, all this offers all of us the chance to transform who we are and where we live. And that only creativity offers us that capacity. If only politics could…