Statement from the Irish Writer's Centre regarding funding.

[Christine Murray]

There's a full list of bursary reductions linked here :

Arts Council Literature Fund Down 13.48% | Irish Publishing News

I really would like to know if the Council advised the Revenue Commissioners on Bertie's eligibility for an artist's exemption at this point ?

[Fred Johnston]

The desire of The Arts Council to run down the operation of the Irish Writers' Centre is clear, so let's start calling this by its proper name: when the Western Writers' Centre in Galway started running lots of readings, workshops, publishing a newsletter and applying for premises the Arts Council removed their programming grant and crippled them, or tried to, because the volume and profile of the work being done upset someone and their own funding strategy. Both are disgraceful - and politicians don't give a damn. In today's Letters page of the Irish Times (February 13th) The Council's Director of Public Affairs, Seán Mac Cárthaigh, is shoved out to defend his masters against letters in newspapers and cut-backs criticism. One has to feel a certain pity. He makes no mention of how the Council were quite willing, in the case of the Western Writers' Centre, to take on board e-mailed copies of letters I had written and published critical of the arts in Galway and sent to them under a false name; desperately they tried to row back on this, saying a new policy was in place since governing anonymous mails, but we never had our grant restored nor received an apology. "The Arts Council is the country’s expert body on the arts. . ." is surely begging for criticism. The Arts Council is no such thing. The Board itself is a politicaly appointed entity; the young officers in charge of this and that are shifted from one discipline to another and none, so far as I know (save perhaps one or two advisors) are practising artists. The Board is not elected by artists. If you can be in charge of visual arts one day, how in God's name can you be taken seriously if you are appointed in charge of dance the next? The perception is that the officers are there in a slightly elevated secretarial role to prevent you from accessing the Parnassian heights occupied by those who do make the decisions. Does transparency reach as far as naming the individual who shook his or her head when your application arrived? No, it does not. The Arts Council is a bank. If you deliver a proposal which fits in with this bank's lending policy, you will receive assistance. Art always takes second place to policy.