John McGahern Seminar Weekend 16th May 2014

Thank you for inviting me to give the opening address at this year’s John

McGahern seminar weekend. It offers me a selfish opportunity to try and

tease out some of my thoughts and opinions on current cultural debates

in Ireland.

It was also a fantastic opportunity to reacquaint myself with John’s

writing and in particular his essays and short stories. This is what has

largely informed my talk this evening. I also realised that while I was

writing this in my office in the Seanad – what was peering down at me

from above on the wall was Colm Hogan’s wonderful photographic

portrait of John McGahern and his dog – taunting me mischievously. –

I knew John McGahern, the man, before I really understood his work.

That the visceral experience of reading his novel Amongst Women only

started to have an impact on me, as I grew older, gained some

experience in the exciting and challenging work of raising a family and

understanding a constantly complicated and complex Ireland. It became

a kind of slow–releasing catharsis for me. The other important thing I

realised about John McGahern is how ruthless and single-minded you

have to be to achieve your goals as an artist.

There can be no compromise, no equivocation and no ambiguity as to

how an artist, a writer might produce, create, slog, abandon, re-write,

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defend, argue, fall-out, relent, sustain, anger, rage, or rue the process of

making an art work – Any art work – And I think John McGahern

managed this through most of his published work. – This body of work is

compact, clear-minded, controlled and precise – McGahern never over-

did it, essays, memoirs, a small pocket of reviews, his short stories and

his legacy is still that his writing offers us a way in to an understanding

of national history, local communities and individual humanity.

He also took care of his sentences as I heard him say himself and advised

others to do the same– I can see that he managed his creative energy

well during this life and it seems to me, anyway, that he didn’t panic (or

just didn’t show it) with some of the publishing gaps between his work

and the critical or non-critical response to his writing. – Maybe that was

the ruthlessness – or single-mindedness of the artist or maybe just

resilience. I think that rearing cattle helped too!

I’m not an artist; I am what can be called, despairingly sometimes, an

arts administrator. A sometimes necessary eunuch; a kind of useful, full-

time, paid, connector of artist to audience. Sometimes getting it right,

often mis-firing, mis-hearing, mis-calculating, mistaking. I’m also a

citizen who wants to contribute constantly to Irish society through my

work in the arts. - As you know, I’m a Senator too and in a privileged

position of not having being elected but constitutionally nominated by An

Taoiseach. – And since I don’t have the courage to stand for election or

the endowment of being an artist, I have found it an enormous privilege

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to have worked with some of the best artists in Ireland over the last 25

years. I am satisfied and clear, that my work in the Arts might make a

modest, slow-release, contribution toward a more diverse, better

informed, politically stimulated society, whereby creativity is seen as

essential and respected, and hopefully enhance a more complete model

of citizenship.

My daily activity is dependent on my understanding of the role and the

attempts of ensuring that the artists’ work, (whether it’s a play, film,

exhibition, piece of music) is seen by as many people as possible and that

whatever about the artist, that the work, not only is protected and

celebrated as widely as possible, but that it is presented in the proper

context. That is what a producer is meant to do.

I am 50 this year and I realise that I have been involved in the arts in one

way or another for over 25 years – I have achieved all kinds of things

from running a national theatre, to making movies and TV dramas, to

advising a Minister for Arts, to running the Project Arts Centre in Temple

Bar, to opening an Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, to running international

festivals be it in Washington DC, Hanover, Sao Paulo or New York. The

reason I am laying out all of these “dodgy” achievements to you this

evening is so that I can attempt, with your indulgence - some kind of

understanding of what I have learned about the role of the artist in Irish

society and how arts and culture stand in relation to the State in 2014.

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As I have just said the reason I am still working in the Irish arts world is

that I want to make a difference or a contribution to Irish society, even

change it or influence it someway. It is through working with artists that

I could do this. I believe, that artists are prophets ( explain further)–

Sometimes, they might not know this and that is okay – but the burden an

artist can carry in what they create, and how they create matters – they

sing that song that can offer an extraordinary insight into the psychic

imagination of our country or nation. They can tell the truth and often

challenge establishment in a way that is brave (sometimes kind) but often

brutal ……as the narrator in McGahern’s ‘The Country Funeral’ explains,

when the brothers are confronting each other:

“There are no things more cruel than truths about ourselves

spoken to us by another that are perceived to be at least half true. Left

unsaid and hidden we feel they can be changed or eradicated, in time”.

That the true role of any good artist and it applies of course of Marina

Carr, as it is does to Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Eavan Boland, Frank

McGuiness, Clare Keegan, Sebastian Barry Belinda McKeon, Mark

O’Rowe, Vincent Woods, Donal Ryan and John McGahern himself.

Not every piece of writing by McGahern achieves that prophetic status –

artists don’t often, always, achieve a catharsis; a clear movable, moving

sense of being – an urgent understanding of what we are about – they

don’t have to, can’t (more likely) achieve this all the time.

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That is what Francis Hardy in Brian Friel’s FAITH HEALER wondered,

challenged and ultimately accepted – he had no choice, actually. Once

can be enough, it might only be once. We were fortunate that McGahern

gave us many opportunities to face that ‘truth’ he spoke about in ‘The

Country Funeral’.

An artist can produce a body of work through their whole life-time and

not achieve what some critics might call a hit or that horrible word –

masterpiece – the lexicon of the marketplace or celebrity culture - but

that is why we need to support and sustain the work of artists in Ireland –

through good and bad times, but also to understand how important an

artist is in his local community– none of these writers did it in one go! –

No amount of revisionism is going to make it an easy narrative for us to

see a linearly successful trajectory for any artist – but we as audiences,

readers, viewers and producers have to support them, love them, forgive

them and pay them. – Because the hard, tough role of the artist is to

make sense of the world this often means that they bite the hand that

feeds it. In this case the State, or the taxpayer, or the citizens; they have

to do this in order to seek a truth of ourselves or offer the sense of our

real and imagined and altered reality.

This is what John McGahern wrote in one of his essays - A Literature with

Qualities

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“I think that a writer in our society, whatever nationality he or she might

be, must, as a writer, refuse to represent any kind of ideological

interests, any aesthetic or political dogma, even if it marginalises him or

condemn him to obscurity. Every writer has to establish for himself his

own aesthetic principles; dogma and prejudgements must be excluded

from his world”

So when I speak of the role of the artist in Irish society or indeed the role

of culture in Irish society, I take heed of the paradox that is innate in

creating art. At one point the artist is set away from his or her

community in writing or creating art, and the paradox is that without that

community the artist won’t have an audience, a readership or a

connection. The risk and perhaps the result is that inevitably artists

might regularly be, as McGahern says “marginalised” – Always a

paradox.

My interest is how can art and artists be central – more central in Irish

society than it has been since 1916 – An artist has a profound duty only

to his/her work – yet it is that work which can be placed in a political or

social context which itself can be advocating for a just and better society,

or at the very least helping us to understand what is happening around

us in our communities.

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We don’t have the tradition in Ireland of an artist as overt commentator –

not in the same way as in England, Scotland or France. In those lands

there is a tradition of the artist as critic or public intellectual which sits,

regularly in opposition to, or in judgement of the body politic. – But in

Ireland, taking heed of John McGahern’s quote, things are done

differently here. – This interregnum therefore between the creation of the

book, film, play has to be mediated by people like me. – Allegory and

image and metaphor and language and sentences are the units of a

writer, it is up to people like me, the administrators, to advocate more

publicly, more savagely, more honestly with the state. – BUT with the

knowledge and support of artists.

I have to make it clear that when I speak of the responsibility of an artist

to society I am distinguishing between artist/prophet and artist/citizen. I

do think that the artist/citizen could become more vocal in influencing

how Irish society might evolve but artist/prophet has an altogether

different responsibility – and that it just to themselves, their sentences

and their brush strokes. If in doubt, the work comes first.

“In a world governed by the desire for total control, the writer must be

the caretaker of the possible” says McGahern in the same essay - A

Literature without Qualities.

Something happened between 1916 and 2014 that I’m finding difficult to

explain or understand, which you will forgive me, in sounding out here

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tonight. Before we had a state, a constitution, a parliament, a democracy,

the centrality of the artist in Irish civic and political life was evident –

loud and clear. Artists as well as writing their own work contributed to

the writing of the 1916 proclamation and provided a creative and artistic

movement and context for the rising as far back as 1897 when WB Yeats,

Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn wrote the manifesto towards the

establishment of the Abbey Theatre. But once the state was founded,

and the technocrats took over, women, dissidents, artists became

marginalised through censorship, poverty and in the case of women,

through the constitution of 1937. I’m speculating of course as I’m not a

historian.

An early radical manifestation of any National Cultural Policy came with

the establishment of the Arts Council in 1951 and at political level with

Charles Haughey’s tax-break for artists in the late 1960’s and the

emergence of a stronger more coherent Arts Council through various

Arts Acts over the last 30 years or so. But not since Michael D. Higgins

making history as Ireland’s first Minister for Culture, have we had a

National Cultural Policy or vision or even an expression of how we think

and articulate the role of culture in our modern Irish democracy.

Almost since Easter Monday 1916 or perhaps indeed since the end of the

Civil War to be more precise – the military and political dimension of our

‘sought-for’ Republic dismissed artists as marginal to any current

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ingredient of our Modern Republic. Maybe the artists dismissed

themselves, I don’t know.

I think John McGahern knew this, he certainly hinted at it. – In fact I

think with Moran in Amongst Women he described the moral vacuum,

the emptiness, the vaceousness even, of the failed promise of the delivery

of the Republic as set out in the proclamation.

I love his quote his essay “From a Glorious Dream to Wink and Nod”.

“Many of the signatories of the proclamation were poor writers and

intellectuals, a more unlikely crowd to spark a nation to freedom would

be hard to imagine; that the serious revolution was brought about mostly

by British Bungling does not lessen their place”

So as we are in the process of commemorating the decade of

Centenaries, it offers us all an opportunity to assess and discuss what

might the role of the artist and the arts in Irish society be.

Every other area in Irish life is under scrutiny, being reassessed, and

publicly debated – Health, Justice, Education, Political Reform, Climate

Change, Human Rights, Housing; yet one of the key aspects of any

citizens’ life, a core make-up of citizenship – their right to access the arts

is only discussed in terms of financial support – how much do artists get

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paid? Or what are the value/benefits of supporting the Arts in Ireland.

Do we need our own tribunal?

AOSDÁNA

The discussion and debate around Aosdána seems like a lazy witch hunt

and makes no sense in this one obvious respect – I have never come

across a group of artists in one single room who ever agreed on anything

regarding art or culture. Why should they? – It seems like too easy a

target………

That is why we don’t always see them in the one room too often, except

at events like this.

To paraphrase McGahern’ s quote again “a writer must refuse to

represent any kind of ideological interests….or political dogma even if it

marginalises them”. Why should they be corralled into Aosdána to offer

any of us or indeed any newspaper a justification of what they do as

artists? There is transparency, we know what they are being paid and

why and how. So that is not an issue.

I support Aosdána because it is about 2 things – It offers a simple

recognition by the state as to what you are – artist – It offers a status, a

title and an acknowledgement that costs nothing. Where else does that

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happen? Not in the dole office, where that is not an acceptable or

recognisable definition.

The second thing it can offer for some members is a small alleviation

from poverty – it can offer time to artists and payment in the form of a

‘Cnuas’ to make art. – We talk a lot in this country about Research and

Development but I think Aosdána can be that – a place, a forum for ideas,

for innovation and for creativity – yes, I think that the structures should

change, the voting of Members should change and actors and so called

‘interpretative’ artists should be included but I am proud that we have

Aosdána as part of our Civil Society…..and we should add another 50

members!

Some who are writing about Aosdána might think of themselves, possibly,

as a contemporary form of the Convention of Drum Ceat which they say

was held in Limavaddy around 570. Although some of its accounts are

fictional, it makes for a great story. McGahern couldn’t resist it either in

referring to it. By the way, I think John would’ve been ambivalent about

the role or status of the artist in society. I think he underplayed it,

whether out of insecurity, the dread of the cult of the artist or some form

of self-protection.

Anyway, here is an excerpt from a conversation from his short story

‘Bank Holiday’, (which I think is a major work of art) – Two characters

are wooing each other, as they look towards Howth – where Maud Gonne

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“waited at the station as Pallas Athena” – you can feel the sexual

excitement and foreplay through the whole story and McGahern’s own

serious analysis of what an artist or in this case a poet is or should be.

The huge presence of Patrick Kavanagh looms large in the story – I’m

digressing a little here but listen to the savage retort offered by the poet

to the narrator, McDonough (McGahern?) in the story:

“You’re a cute hoar, McDonagh. You’re a mediocrity. It’s no wonder, you

get on so well in the world”.

This might be a possible hint that McGahern does revere the courage of

the artist in all it’s insecurities over the ‘mediocrity’ of McDonagh who

was a senior civil servant writing Ministerial speeches.

Anyway, a little earlier in the story the legend of this great meeting at

Drum Ceat is discussed between this beautiful woman and McDonough,

the mediocre poet;

“’They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in

this unfortunate country’

‘Why unfortunate’ she said quietly.

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‘They create no wealth. They are greedy and demanding. They hold

themselves in very high opinion. Ten Centuries ago there was a National

Convocation, an attempt to limit their power and numbers’

‘Wasn’t it called Drum something?’

‘Drum Ceat’, he added, made uneasy by his own attack’

‘But don’t you feel that they have a function – beyond wealth?’ she

pursued

‘What function?’

‘That they sing the tired rowers to the hidden shore?’

‘Not in the numbers we possess here, one singing down the other. But

maybe I’m unkind. There are a few’

‘Are there poets to be seen?’

‘They can’t be hidden.’’

So this debate in the media about Aosdána has a skewed focus. – The

focus should be on the challenge of centralising the artist and culture in

Irish society. To have the courage and tenacity to think of Culture as a

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real and meaningful component of Irish Citizenship. We have no self-

confidence to this in our own language. How can we articulate the

intrinsic value of art and culture in our communities? How and in whose

language, should we approach candidates in the Local or European

Elections and ask them to support culture in our communities.

We have been robbed of the one thing we used to have control over –

Language – We are now borrowing the language of economists, of

tourism, of job creation, of training, of community development to

advocate or justify government support for the arts. – We have lost our

self-confidence to express ourselves in our own terms – Arts for Arts sake

– and we have no conviction to impress this on policy makers and

politicians. More often than not we are embarrassed.

NATIONAL CULTURAL POLICY

I work a lot with the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) in trying to

reconcile this problem. A 2016 Republic of Culture manifesto has been

published and we have started an advocacy campaign around making the

case for the centrality of cultural participation and artistic engagement

for all the people in Ireland.

The NCFA’ s overall aims is to be a voice for the arts in Ireland,

communicating the value of the arts and campaigning for continued and

increased engagement with and investment in the arts, to work with

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others to ensure Ireland values all those who work in the arts and

crucially provide a supportive environment for artists. – We need to also

work with others to enable the arts to make the fullest possible

contribution to Irish society and its future.

On that point I welcome publicly the Arts Council’s current review of

itself and how it might do its work better in a tighter financial landscape.

I also welcome the appointment of Sheila Pratschke as Chairperson of

the Arts Council. –Clearly one of the new directions the Arts Council has

to take is to become much more vocal, around the support for artists in

Ireland. The NCFA campaign was founded because there was no public

advocacy being made that we could hear – I think there is a climate of

fear among artists and arts organisations, with some notable exceptions,

about publicly challenging government or policy matters or indeed the

Arts Council itself when it comes to policy or funding – The fear of

poverty, is a mighty censor.

We can communicate brilliantly in private but the fear of criticising a

Government, a Minister and Arts Council can make it a mute and moot

point. How can the public understand our fears and ambitions if we just

talk to ourselves? – That doesn’t happen in other sectors of society

Housing, Education, Social Justice, and Climate Change.

I think the time is right now to call on the Government for us to have a

national debate about a Cultural Policy – there is none –

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Michael Starrett is CEO of the Heritage Council and Chair of the CNCI –

this is what he said last week

“We live in a democracy and those democracies are led best when

politicians have legislative and policy led frameworks within which to

work. It is for that reason that we now need a National Cultural Policy,

one which would include engagement with the Higher Education sector

by necessity and one which will need courageous and visionary political

leadership to deliver.

We can of course all continue to work within a framework that has served

us well that set up by our current visionary president Michael D Higgins

when as Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht he saw and

grasped the opportunity which the responsibility brought to his Ministry.

But that was 20 years ago and for 15 of those 20 years our Cultural

Institutions rode on the back of his long term and transformational

vision. We now need, to build on it again for the next 20 years”.

I call on the Government to review the arts in Ireland during the decade

of centenaries whereby all of us can have a stake in insisting that citizens

have a right of full and equal access to the arts, in the same as we do to

Education Housing and Water (although we can see the challenges there

too). We need to establish a Republic of Culture for 2016 – How about a

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Drum Ceat Convocation for the 21st Century to be held in Easter Week

2016.

Incidentally, a mischeivous but perhaps incisive commentary which

McGahern regarding the Rising was about its timing:

“In addition to the openness of the Proclamation to all the people of

Ireland, I think that it was unlucky for the Rising that it took place

around Easter. This placed it in direct competition with the Church’s

greatest festival”.

COMMEMORATION-ANXIETY

I do suspect, in fact, I know, that there is a considerable anxiety

emanating from Government regarding the commemoration of the

decade of centenaries and in particular for Easter Rising of 1916. This

Commemoration Anxiety has been going on for a while, which I believe

will end up in Commemoration paralysis!

This anxiety or paralysis means that historians are now publicly

fighting/or in disagreement over issues of protocols over Royal visits that

should or should not happen. We should be planning and announcing our

celebrations for the Easter Rising now. For instance how about

convening a General Assembly of the United Nations in Dublin in 2016?

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As Director of the Abbey Theatre, we are already at planning and

commissioning stage regarding how we might mark the Easter Rising in

a similar manner in which we marked the Lockout of 1913. I was

particularly proud of all 63 artists and activists we invited to do the

Noble Call after the production of THE RISEN PEOPLE – from Prisoners

in Wheatfield Prison to Stephanie Meehan, to Panti herself.

Commemorations are a complicated process but we have to trust that

there will be dignity and partisanship sitting side-by-side in any event we

do. Again a nod from John McGahern is worth heeding here. McGahern

said that the 1916 Rising was not considered of great importance in the

country that he grew up in. And in a way it was the ‘promise unfulfilled’

that caused that and this is a recurring theme in Amongst Women and

indeed in his essays.

What should we celebrate? Or commemorate? If not to see how we have

managed ourselves in the intervening 100 years – No wonder the

government is anxious about it – but it is the truth that we need to

assess? – But of course that is not that simple either. – McGahern

admired the writing of the historian J.C. Beckett and I will quote from

John’s essay on meeting him

“I admired the histories of the late Professor J.C. Beckett,

especially the clarity of his writing, and when we met and I told him so,

he was glad. As he thanked me, he remarked, ‘or course, they’re

prejudiced’ with a very sly twinkle. What this has always seemed to me

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to imply is that there is no such thing as a “true” history. Each is a

version of what has taken place, and everybody who writes is coming

from somewhere”

And that is the point which all of us, including the commemoration

committee should take note of; don’t worry; there is no right and proper

line to take in commemoration. – The complicated and more diverse it is,

the better. – It is a little less than two years from now and in terms of

national planning we don’t want the problems of a short-lead-in period

which dogged Limerick City of Culture or indeed the Cork Capital of

Culture.

We should also not be afraid of the role of culture in commemoration and

artists will support this and be critical in imaginative ways. Of course,

one needs to look no further than Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the

Stars – which is still the greatest warning to us all of the promise

unfulfilled in a new Republic. – O’Casey, incidentally, felt the greatest

and most dramatic impact on Irish history of the 20th century was the

1913 lockout and if you connect that to the withdrawal of the Labour

Party from the 1918 General Election – how different Ireland might have

been. It is these “What ifs?” that are just as important and interesting to

explore in commemoration rather than over-controlling or deterministic

stance on what we can agree on what happened or might’ve have

happened.

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Professor Richard Kearney has spoken recently about how artists,

through their artwork, deal with Trauma, such as the great Irish Famine

or the Holocaust, for instance. He probes the question of political

memory and asks how might we combine, the poetics of narrative with

the ethics of responsibility in addressing two major duties

1) to realise our debt to historical past and

2) To respect the rival claims of memory and forgetfulness.

Memory as McGahern writes about both in fiction and his essays is never

neutral and neither is history.

This is what, I might suggest, is causing the Government anxiety, - the

conflict between history and memory and the politics of today. Who owns

commemorations?

And this is where artist and culture will play and enormous role in

transcending the apparent opposites of history and memory. Whatever

about the challenges of commemoration 1916, the Irish Civil War will be

much more complicated and challenging for us and I believe that we can

look to McGahern for inpsiration here and to make these commerations

as much about the local as the national.

President Michael D Higgins called on all of us to look at new ways of

creating myths as a way of gaining a new understanding of ourselves. As

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President Higgins said on the Abbey stage this January at our own

symposium on The Theatre of Memory – “Commemoration involves a

choice between events and historical actors, motivations and

consequences, and its purposes may be as allusive and complex as the

various original impulses to remember. In other words, only

“interpretations of memory” are collectively remembered and

commemorated”.

If ever there was an ailment to relieve the Government’s

commemoration- anxiety this is it – It will be achieved through art,

literature, theatre where we in Ireland as President Higgins says “laid

bare the full creative potential of myth making in both sense of memory

and imagination”

I will leave McGahern with the final words and perhaps a warning too,

with less than 2 years to go to the celebration of the centenary of Easter

Rising.

“I think that we can best honour 1916 by restoring those rights and

freedoms that were whittled away from the National as a whole in favour

of the dominant religion. We should put the spirit of the Proclamation

into our laws. What we care likely to get, though, are more of the

outward shows – maybe even a grant or two - while Wink goes out in

search of Nod”. (From a ‘Glorious Dream to Wink to a Nod’)

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