guest editors' introduction

GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION An Introductory Essay on Culture in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland: A Floating Anchorage of Identities

Booms always engender hysteria but what made the Irish one so extreme was that it was filling a void. The Celtic Tiger wasn’t just an economic ideology. It was also a substitute identity. It was a new way of being that arrived just at the point when Catholicism and nationalism were not working any more. At its cheapest, this identity expressed itself in a mad consumerism, in an arrogance toward the rest of the world, in a willful refusal of all ties of history and tradition. But there were other things wrapped up in it too—optimism, confidence, a new openness and ease, an absence of fear. The banking collapse of 2008 didn’t just kill off the arrogance and acquisitive mania, it also swept away the hopefulness and the sense of possibility. It is not just money that has been lost; it is a sense of what, for better or worse, it meant to be “us.” —Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough 3-4. Time is death, and loss and uncertainty haunt any present as its common fate and as a problem to solve, the problem of revitalization and renewal in a situation where the origin is absent. —Alan Blum, The Imaginative Structure of the City 62. The fundamental ambiguity of culture arises from its character as a problem-solving situation where the very problem to be solved is the continuous clarification of the situation itself, that is, of the object as a course of action … [This] conception of culture, as collective problem solving animated by the need and desire to resolve the question of the common situation, permits us to anticipate occasions on which … destabilization becomes a locus of interpretation and action. —Blum 53-54. As Fintan O’Toole summarizes in his 2010 publication, Enough is Enough, throughout both the Celtic and Post Celtic Tiger eras, Ireland experienced Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 37, no. 1-2 (2011). Special issue, “Culture and ‘Out of Placeness’ in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland, 2008-2013.” © 2013 CJIS and the author

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significant destabilization. While the dislocation of the Celtic Tiger years was largely welcomed by the Irish population because its wealth helped generate “optimism, confidence, a new openness and ease, an absence of fear” (O’Toole 3) the consequent financial crisis and the ensuing recession opened a new area of investigation for scholars on culture and the arts in cultural history, cultural economy, sociology, art history, and media studies. In this introduction, we want to take up the conception of culture as fundamentally ambiguous, as “a locus of interpretation and action” (Blum 54), and seek to understand cultural and critical responses as ways of clarifying the object that is Ireland, in the papers that follow. That is, by reflecting on cultural practices, these papers provide an opportunity to explore the ways in which the ambiguous object that is Ireland is clarified. Whether it be changes in Irish cultural policy, or the relation of artists to the State, the contestation over the division the Irish flag plays in Downpatrick’s St Patrick’s Day parade, the changing eating and drinking habits of the Irish, the flourishing of community arts in Northern Ireland, reflections on three contemporary visual artists, the fascination of the Irish people with a television crime series, the art of Rita Duffy, or the historic debate in the Irish language during the last general election, all the papers offer interpretive responses to the common cultural situation of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. If “loss and uncertainty haunt” Ireland’s present, the papers in this volume provide ways of recognizing such phenomena as reflections of an encounter that is “animated by fundamental questions that engage … both positively and negatively at the same time” (Blum 50). What insight can the arts offer to Ireland’s contemporary predicament? What might an understanding of culture and cultural objects reveal, particularly in relation to the place of criticism or complacency in contemporary Irish discourse on cultural practices, literature and the arts? To respond to such questions, an international conference bringing together scholars and artists was organized by Alexandra Slaby at the University of Caen, Lower Normandy, on December 2-3, 2011.1 In all but one case, the contributors to Culture and ‘Out of Placeness’ in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland: 2008-2013 attended the conference and were subsequently able to reflect on their respective topic in the context of that event, as well as during the intervening period. Gathered in this collection, the essays go forward as a body of work that invites a much broader cohort of stakeholders to contemplate the complexities and ambiguities of this range of cultural signifiers over the last two decades.

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The nomenclature of Post Celtic Tiger Ireland points to the dramatic changes brought about by the financial collapse of the country in 2008, itself following on the dramatic changes in wealth the Tiger brought to Ireland in the 1990s. If the rise in wealth during the Celtic Tiger was meteoric, the fall has been equally precipitous such that now, per capita, the Irish people are among the most indebted in the world. The experience of such a disastrous fall from grace has given rise to questions regarding who is to blame. While the most prominent are “the reckless bankers, the feckless regulators and the delusional developers” (O’Toole 13), along with, of course, the corrupt politicians, many other voices ask where were the critics of the rush to conspicuous consumption, of the valorization of neoliberal policies, of the complacent welcome of globalization, and so on. Phenomenologically speaking, the experience of disaster (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Irish Famine, the 2008 financial collapse) generates a discourse that includes identifying causes (e.g., villains) but also takes into account reflections on how it was possible in the first place. Hence we are not surprised to see interrogation about what kind of conditions led the Irish to surrender to, from O’Toole’s perspective, “a mad consumerism, [to] an arrogance toward the rest of the world, [to] a willful refusal of all ties of history and tradition” (O’Toole 3). In this sense, the common situation that is being clarified addresses the issue of a “sense of loss of what it meant to be us,” including, as we will see in the papers that follow, in what way that loss is or is not true. The papers participate in that discourse, using the particular lenses of art, art criticism, and the broad cultural practices of the Post Celtic Tiger era. In so doing, they show as much a “floating anchorage of identities” (see Morisson) as a loss of identity, and also thereby serve to illustrate that a recognition of loss can also constitute a gain in itself. It is the purpose of an introduction to offer an overarching vantage point from which to engage with the collection as a whole. To that end the articles will be treated here, in Gadamer’s term, as “fusions of horizon” which reveal the perspective of the author (his or her particular horizon or place in discourse) as much as the “object” encountered (namely, a particular expression of Post Celtic Tiger culture). Each paper will therefore be considered hermeneutically, as the outcome of an encounter between a “knower” (the author) and that object to be analyzed. Following this premise, our introduction does not so much neutrally describe or summarize the articles in the collection, as collaboratively engage them as individual struggles with the question of “the continuous clarification of the situation” that is culture in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland. This introduction,

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therefore, posits a further layer of creative tension between the voice coming out of our own horizon and the voices of the articles to which it responds. We hear a compelling blend of voices in Fionna Barber’s essay on Rita Duffy’s artwork, or, more specifically, the voice of Barber encountering the voices in Duffy’s work. Barber finds the past reasserting its presence in “contemporary Northern Ireland” through “the survival of entrenched ideas and beliefs that cling on resolutely to an existence in the face of social and political transformation, or the return of traumatic events apparently long distant.” That is, the old signifiers of Catholicism and nationalism, which, according to O’Toole, “were not working anymore,” are seen to maintain status as signifiers through their ambiguous but nevertheless powerful presence in this art. Duffy’s work, says Barber, “encourages us to see the world with different eyes, to make the connections between past and present, and between Ireland and the world beyond” showing the possibilities of alternative meanings to the either/ or choice of Northern Ireland’s identity politics. As the reader/viewer can see, ordinary domestic objects, whether handkerchief, dining table, or sofa, reveal a sinister fragility underneath their denoted comfort. As such, they disrupt the bourgeois confidence in domestic objects. Duffy’s work is a telling counterpoint to the nouveau-riche identity such objects offered during the Celtic Tiger days of “mad consumerism.” Kieran Bonner takes up the issue of consumerism in his interdisciplinary article on the Tiger’s effects on the culture of Ireland. Following Blum, he builds on a broad definition of culture, which includes eating and drinking, and the relationship to space (home, the workplace, and the third space of the pub or café). Starting with the contested but epoch-defining closure of the muchloved Bewley’s Cafés in 2004, he shows that the changes that altered eating and drinking habits during the Celtic Tiger years have sustained themselves, in more muted fashion, in the Post Celtic Tiger era. Behind the newly developed taste for coffee in addition to tea, or even cappuccino over tea or coffee, for wine in addition to beer, Continental food in addition to Irish stew, and so on, lie changes in social habits which suggest a new relationship to Europe and a new relation to identity. He notes how Arendt’s description of the behavior of aristocrats in the ancien régime being “devoted to conspicuous consumption, conforming to fashion, and obsessed with their social status” (Canovan 119), is uncomfortably descriptive of the “flash, flash, flash, spend, spend, spend” practices of Celtic Tiger days. However, he also explores the way the Celtic Tiger led to an embrace and development of a taste for European, even Mediterranean

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culture. “The culture of food, wine, craft beer, of eating out like the Italians and the French, points to the gap between the Euro as an economic union and the meaning of Europe as a civilization with which the Irish share solidarity.” This notion of taste is developed as the hidden possibility offered by both the Celtic Tiger and Post Celtic Tiger eras, the possibility of an Irish hermeneutic assimilation of a culture formerly identified as foreign and European. While O’Toole plausibly describes such a promise as suffocated by the Irish inclination to passively accept outside influence, whether global ideology or ECB/IMF strictures, Bonner argues that the promise is real as such—though it is also an abstract hope unless the difficult work of re-shaping the self is undertaken. He implies that “the sense of possibility” of what it means to be Irish has not been lost with the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, thereby pointing to an additional thread of complexity in the “us” that constitutes Irish identity. Alexandra Slaby addresses the dramatic transformation in Irish cultural policy in recent years, highlighting another risk of Ireland’s relation to Europe. She writes that Ireland’s Smart Economy document (2009) “places an onus on culture to ‘Build the Ideas Economy’ and create ‘the Innovation Island’ so that Ireland can become ‘the innovation and commercialization hub’ of Europe.” Discussing the influence of cultural theorists like Richard Florida, Slaby shows how the idea of culture is now dominated by the vaguely-defined and identityneutral term cultural industries which nonetheless carry the new emphasis on creativity and innovation. During a period of severe recession, it is understandable that Ireland might choose to make use of whatever resources it can for economic recovery. Nevertheless, one recalls Arendt’s warning that “Culture is threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society” (Arendt 205). In a way reminiscent of the widespread embrace of conspicuous consumption that marks the Celtic Tiger period, Slaby shows an Ireland embracing, if belatedly, so-called best practices dominant in Europe. In short, cultural practices are now to be judged in terms of their contribution to the economy. According to Slaby, as the current Irish cultural policy agenda is dictated from above or outside, it no longer reflects individual visions of culture derived from any unique political perspective within the country, for example the political party in power. It is as though Ireland, at least in this case, and as Fintan O’Toole has underlined, had lost the ability to use its distinct cultural self as the driving force to develop the hermeneutic assimilation of contemporary influences. If Celtic Tiger identity filled the vacuum of an evacuated Catholic

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and nationalist identity, Post Celtic Tiger Ireland frames its population as wellbehaving Europeans taking their medicine. As John Banville remarked, “One of the biggest differences is that today Ireland is the Good Boy of Europe, a shining example of newfound fiscal rectitude when compared to what the more prudent northern European countries consider the irredeemably profligate Greeks, Portuguese, Spaniards and Italians. This is a novel position for us. It is as if the shiftless urchin who used to skulk and daydream in the back row has been summoned to the front of the class by … Germany’s latter-day Iron Chancellor to be presented with a medal and scroll” (New York Times, December 17, 2011). If the De Valera image of Irish culture was to embrace a simple traditionalism in defiance of European modernity, Celtic Tiger and Post Celtic Tiger Ireland seem like an unreserved rush to be accepted. Here the common “object” that is Ireland, as expressed in official conceptions of culture, appears as a character who attempts to make up for the Celtic Tiger binge and failure by projecting an image of how it is imagined by the other (Europe, US). Political manipulation or instrumentalization of culture is the issue that Pat Cooke addresses, leading us to the heart of Celtic Tiger cultural politics. “Perhaps even more than in the 1930s,” he says, “a crisis of capital has become a crisis of culture, due to the ever-closer interweaving of cultural values and practices with consumerist capitalism over the past half century. If the present moment is one where a dominant neoliberal ideology has been exposed to critique, the questioning of some of the more stable assumptions underpinning cultural policy for the past thirty years or so has formed an element of it.” In a lively review of the relation of the Irish State to art and artists, he shows the historical movement from policies which supported art education but not artists, to the support of artists as engaged artists, and to the establishment of Aosdána whereby artists are directly supported, including the strange postmodern vision of Charles Haughey, which sought to combine of the “romantic with the neo-feudal.” Cooke shows how a crisis of capital became a crisis of culture because of a relationship between culture, politics, and economics that was too close for comfort. He even goes as far as arguing that this closeness was part of the downfall of the Celtic Tiger, echoing a claim made by many that if the establishment failed to warn of the impending disaster, neither did the writers and artists. When a coterie of artists is subsidized by the state, and the critical voices are so few and so weak, what is the future of the arm’s length principle whereby the arts world was supposed to operate freely from political interests? While the economic crisis has spurred a debate about the role of the arts specifically in contemporary Ireland, Cooke wisely moves the debate beyond 28 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

national boundaries to facilitate the possibility of engaging fundamental questions. He examines the role of the artist in relation to the State and explores the diverse debate that engages and centres this discourse, from the artist as autonomous, to the artist as self-validating, to the artist as a speaker of truth to power, to the artist who expresses a “general sense of responsibility for the world” (Havel 185), and so on. Cooke explores the complex and difficult relation between the artist, their inspiration, and what if any obligation they have to a sponsor/patron/taxpayer. This, of course, raises the fundamental question of the relation between art and culture, and between the love of beauty and the ambiguity of the common situation. To call on Arendt again, this points to a political concern, the political capacity of judgment or taste “that truly humanizes the beautiful and creates a culture” (Arendt 224). “Culture and politics,” she says, “belong together because it is not knowledge or truth which is at stake, but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kinds of things are to appear in it” (223). According to Cooke, the challenge for Ireland is how, despite desperate and urgent economic imperatives, to create a space for a world that resists judgment on the basis of either “utility” or life’s “vital interests.” Prospects for this are very challenging, when in the current crisis the arts are now vaunted for their ability to “either directly or indirectly produce economic benefits to society.” The social benefits of the arts to society are discussed by Hélène HamayonAlfaro, who traces the success of the emergence of community arts in Northern Ireland. While these were a form of counter-culture in the 1970s, they are now at the core of Northern Irish arts policy. Hamayon-Alfaro shows how community arts policies and social inclusion policies worked in synergy under the New Labour government to facilitate the sharing of the cultural space and to foster community bonding. Her documentation shows “that while they were once marginalized and undervalued, community arts are now being used as reconciliation tools that can help to bring about social as well cultural and political inclusion.” Here, we see that one of the great political successes during the Celtic Tiger years, The Good Friday Agreement, works its way through communities and through government sponsored community arts initiatives. In this light Hamayon-Alfaro concludes “that the advocacy of community selfhelp—traditionally a feature of nationalist areas—has accelerated the integration of the Catholic community into the political decision-making process” in Northern Ireland. As with Rita Duffy’s work, it is apparent that nationalism Bonner and Slaby An Introductory Essay on Culture in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland | 29

and Catholicism, while they do not have the same hold in the Republic as in the past, are still central identifiers in the North, identifiers that have a claim on the attention of the Republic. If one child of the Celtic Tiger is the durable peace brought about in the North and therefore in Ireland, then the common situation being clarified relates to the need for Ireland to work out a just relation between the confidence and openness that made the Agreement possible and the overconfidence of “mad consumerism.” The “us” being contemplated by Alfaro-Hamayon may include a re-engagement with, rather than willful refusal of all ties of history and tradition. The anchorage of nationalist and Catholic identities, despite O’Toole’s assertion above, continues to speak to a sense of what it means to be Irish through the politics of Northern Ireland. Danine Farquharson takes the question of shifting identities to the screen when she proposes to look at the first season of the Irish television series Love/Hate and sees it as “symptomatic of the exact social-political context that produced it: a Post Celtic Tiger Ireland in the depths of a recession and plagued by financial scandal and democratic crises. … The crises of interest here [however] are anxieties around manly behavior and masculinity.” This most-watched television series in Ireland in 2011, which has been compared (unfavorably in some cases) to shows like The Wire or The Sopranos, reflects both global interests and local history. “Fionn, Cuchulain, and the rogue characters are recalibrated in Love/Hate’s Ireland of global economic crisis. The most obvious connections are the characters’ status as both outlaw and hero and their propensity for violence.” “The characters are trapped in fateful cycles of violence and revenge reminiscent of Greek tragedy but played out so often in gangster narratives.” One of the main characters, Darren, she concludes, “is the Post Celtic Tiger anti-hero: groping, puzzled, cross, mocking, frustrated, and isolated in his manful or blundering attempts to establish his own personal codes.” If Love/ Hate is a modern media version of the relation of the ancient Greeks to tragedy, this implies it has cathartic elements as it portrays the recognition of a bitter truth. The “ambiguities around Irish masculine identities” in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland in this case show hollowness, illustrative of the ambiguities around what it means to be “us” in O’Toole’s terms. Her narrative is also connotative of both the “fallen” motif—(anti) hero to criminal—and, as well, the flawed “work in progress” motif (groping, puzzled), again reflective, in the case of our introduction, of an Irish struggle with its “anchorage of identities.” Ambiguities in contemporary Irish identity are at the core of Ruth Lysaght’s paper about the first major party political debate in Irish to be carried on Irish 30 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

television, which took place on February 16, 2011. This historic event provides Lysaght, a scholar of Irish and Maori TV channels, with the opportunity to observe new relationships to, in this case, an ironically minoritized language. The Irish language, as one of Ireland’s two official languages and an important prop of Irish identity, is native to only about two to three percent of the Irish population. Thus Teilifís na Gaeilge (now TG4), a unique media phenomenon in the national broadcasting system in Ireland, highlights a long-standing ambivalence about the place of the Irish language in Irish identity. As Lysaght notes, this important prop of Irish identity is, in reality, “on the ‘edge’ of the centralized ‘national’ society.” “For many in Ireland, the language acts as a ‘symbolic lightning rod,’ releasing pain and confusion.” While for one commentator the very staging of a debate in Irish during a general election was “a source of pride and recognition for Irish,” another expresses it thus: “I deeply regret being unable to speak my own language in my own country, I watched the leader’s debate on TG4 with a sense of shame as though I did not deserve to hold an Irish passport.” As Lysaght states: “it is clear that for many people, Irish has somehow taken on more psychological complexity than being simply a language, morphing instead into an aspect of their sense of national identity and self-worth.” This ambivalent pride in an expression of Irish identity that the majority of the Irish people are not even able to exercise, again shows that the old signifiers are not as empty as O’Toole seems to imply Again, with Valérie Morisson’s article on two photographers and a video artist, we encounter ambivalence and ambiguity—in this case regarding the Irish sense of place in the particular intertwining of the local and the global. Commenting on David Monahan’s Leaving Dublin photographic series, which explores the resurgence of migration from Ireland during the Post Celtic Tiger period, she notes that “current emigration no longer intersects with the myth of the nation. New technologies have made it possible for expatriates to recreate a sense of cultural belonging so that the former opposition between rootedness and displacement is bypassed by new forms of trans-regional worldliness.” If the pattern of emigration of the young (many of them here to Canada) has returned with a vengeance (in terms of numbers they have reached Famine levels), this time the object that is Ireland is not so much a bounded territory with a fixed past, as a place immersed in “webs of connections” (easily navigated by cheap and abundant airline travel, for example) and crossroads of social media such that the goodbye is not as final as in previous generations. Particularly noteworthy in this globalized Irish picture is the fact that approximately forty-seven percent of those emigrating from Ireland had themselves been immigrants to Ireland Bonner and Slaby An Introductory Essay on Culture in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland | 31

from many different countries, and so “their memories of Dublin interfere with their experiences of other places and their social connections.” Moreover, such leavers have already experienced the pain and difficulty of packing up and heading off to settle elsewhere, thereby underscoring their conceptualization of Irish identity as, “a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations.” Given that multiculturalism is one expression of globalization, we clearly have a new multicultural Ireland encountering a multicultural world. In her analysis of Anthony Haughey’s photographic series, Morisson explores the contrast between one of the most potent symbols of the Celtic Tiger, namely the building site, with an equally potent Post Celtic Tiger symbol: the ghost estate. These often ill-inserted hulk-like empty houses, “standing out against a dark, misty [beautiful] landscape” are, she says, citing Robert Ginsberg, “home to out of placeness.” They are the most visible physical evidence of the unbridled consumerism to which so many Celtic Tiger Irish surrendered, and they serve as unintentional if uncomfortable reminders of, and memorials to, this temptation to excess consumption. Like ruins, Morisson argues, these ghost houses evolve into “moral symbols”: they “shamefully commemorate the vanity of wealth and the corruption that crept into the Irish political system, being ‘a silent reproach to those who built them.’” Haughey’s artwork conveys a strong sense of dislocation in relationship to space, and reminds the viewer of the ways in which Irish identity has been made strange to itself. Indeed, the ghost estates, houses that never became homes, might be seen as ambiguous spaces in their own right, as concrete reminders of the pervasive “mad consumerism” during the Celtic Tiger years. Morrison also addresses Ailbhe Ni Bhrian’s series of video works that inscribe “the landscape and our relationship to it with another layer of strangeness.” The images of modern banal office furniture interrupting a seascape horizon suggest something surreal about modern Ireland. The stranger here is not the outsider, the foreigner, or colonizer, as a nationalist consciousness might construe it, but a part of a modern Irish self projected onto nature. All in all, Morisson’s essay shows the way a select group of Irish visual artists, seek to address the strange in Irish identity, whether it is the immigrant as emigrant, the ghost of a “mad” excess, or the surreal as strange. Returning to the telling power of national and religious identifiers, Thérèse Cullen discusses the symbolic and spatial politics of St Patrick’s Day parades in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. Here we see that the virtues arising out of the confidence of Protestants and Catholics to engage the other—an orientation which requires an openness and which led to the peace agreement, are challenged when the symbols of the past (St Patrick’s cross, the Irish tricolor) are read as 32 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

territorial claims. Cullen introduces the notions of neutral and shared spaces to address the idea of St Patrick as a symbol for both communities, but points out tensions that arise through possible discrepancies over “who owns the Saint.” Indeed, recent parades have been marked by contested appropriations of space and material culture such that, as she points out, “both sides of the divide perceive Patrick in their own image and wish to display him in their own image.” Acknowledging the challenge of “how to negotiate the flags issue whilst still recognizing Patrick as a common symbol” she proceeds to ask a more generalized, pivotal question: “how do you participate in a shared event without losing your own identity?” Cullen’s paper demonstrates that national and Catholic issues continue to be relevant in contemplating Irish identity, as one of the many layers of Post Celtic Tiger Irish identity. Whereas identity in Northern Ireland can seem (primarily?) oppositional and mutually exclusive, and occasions of unity can easily become that of contest and division, identity in the Republic seems more centered on a struggle to negotiate a just relation between the new (e.g. multiculturalism) and the old. Reflexively speaking, therefore, the papers that follow are instances of “the collective problem solving animated by the need and desire to resolve the question of the common situation” (Blum 54). The voice of this introduction speaks of these papers as reflecting a Post Celtic Tiger Ireland struggling with an “anchorage of identities,” that are both self and other. Development of the self, as Hegel has reminded us, requires engagement with the strange and alien, including what is strange and alien about the self. Do these reflections on Post Celtic Tiger Ireland point to Freud’s lesson that “to be healthy for a civilized man, the task is hard” (Freud 66)? The sense of what Irish identity means is a challenging, pluralized, and complicated phenomenon. Ironically, O’Toole’s proposition of the loss of a sense of self recognizes a feature of identity in its own right, the recognition of the presence of loss and so of what is strange about the sign of Irishness. If the recent years in Ireland are an experience of the familiar being made strange in a way that has made Ireland poor and metaphorically out of place, it is an example of what Rancière calls a “countermarch; discovering the other in the same; that is to say learning to miss one’s way” (quoted in Blum 46). To learn to miss one’s way is to embrace the aporia that requires examining what Irish human excellence looks like—an examination, as Socrates has shown, that itself can be an example of the very excellence being examined. On a more informal note, we would like to conclude our introduction acknowledging very particular voices and institutions that made this special issue possible—the contributors, the anonymous reviewers, the Managing Bonner and Slaby An Introductory Essay on Culture in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland | 33

Editor, Sara Spike, the Editorial Board, and most of all the Editor of this journal, Rhona Richman Kenneally. Rhona has been a wonderful midwife to this publication, overseeing the review process, carefully reading the papers, responding with suggestions, ideas, and concerns, always with an artful tact. We are grateful to have had such help and guidance through every stage of the publication process. Finally, we should note the financial contributions of our respective institutions, St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo and the University of Caen Lower Normandy, to this project. In these difficult economic times, such support affirms the importance of understanding the challenging intangibility of the phenomenon of culture. ¶ Kieran Bonner and Alexandra Slaby

A Treasury of Resources

NOTES 1 The artists were Rita Duffy, John Byrne, and Desi Wilkinson. The keynote speakers were Kieran Bonner (St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo) and Pat Cooke (Director of the MA in Art History and Cultural Policy at the National University of Ireland, Dublin). Scholars were invited to give papers on the following topics: contemporary artistic creation in Ireland and among the Irish Diaspora in Canada, including literature, music, cinema, architecture, etc.; cultural institutions: attendance, evolutions of museography; cultural tourism, festivals, and cultural marketing strategies; cultural industries; formal or informal cultural practices (purchase of commercial cultural goods); media (broadcasting, the press, the Internet) as a critical space; changing definitions of culture and contemporary cultural discourse; studies of cultural participation; comparison with Northern Ireland (impact of Good Friday Agreement on cultural practices; culture and peace-building/community-bonding). WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968. Blum, Alan. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2003. Canovan, Margaret. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1949. Havel, Vaclav. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings, 1990-1996. New York: Knopf, 1997. O’Toole, Fintan. Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.

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Fionna Barber

Rita Duffy’s Unquiet Relics At the start of Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows (2009) an unidentified man slowly disrobes in a cell, watched by guards who then remove his clothes. When he next dresses, it will be in an orange jumpsuit. There is no need to tell us what this means: the uniform is familiar from a thousand media images. The question hangs there: “how did it come to this?”1 In a painting by Rita Duffy a similar jumpsuit waits on a coat hanger, suspended against a blank wall as if waiting to be filled once again with a human presence. Again, similar questions arise, what has happened here and what is about to happen? Rendered useless from its original function as protective clothing, the jumpsuit becomes a mark of its wearer’s vulnerability. Stripped of its humanity, the prisoner’s identity becomes meaningful only through the discourses of surveillance and punishment as institutionalized expedients in a globalized war against terror. In keeping with the latter-day inquisition suggested by the painting’s title, Duffy’s Guantanamo, Amas, Amat (2009) also indicates the artist’s concern with clothing as imbued with ritual significance, although its religious function is frequently overlaid with more overtly political reference. An earlier work, simply entitled Relic (2001), depicts a similarly disembodied garment, a bulky parka, floating against a dark background. This is another piece of clothing worn in a prison, although thousands of miles from an American airbase in the Caribbean; its outmoded styling, furthermore, suggests a date many years before the impact of 9/11. Yet in contrast also with the distinctive jumpsuit’s role in maintaining Guantanamo, Amas, Amat (2009) oil on linen, 183 cm x 122 cm

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the prisoner’s anonymity, this unassuming jacket is woven through with the presence of its former owner. Duffy came across it in Armagh Prison shortly before its demolition; apparently it once belonged to Mairéad Farrell, the leader of the Republican women imprisoned in Armagh in the early 1980s, and who was subsequently killed in an SAS ambush in Gibraltar in 1988. Despite the spectral presence of these pieces of clothing and others in her more recent paintings, Rita Duffy’s work has not always been so depopulated, or so quietly measured, although her concern for social and political issues has remained constant. In the immediate years after graduating from the University of Ulster with a Masters in Fine Art in 1986 her paintings and drawings combined acute social observation of her native Belfast, particularly focused around the experience of women, with a skilful and fluent draftswomanship. Yet her methods of drawing and painting became more expressive in keeping with the emotive depiction of politically derived subject matter, as in the charcoal drawings The Unheard, based on the consequences of the 1988 Broadcasting Ban, or The Marley Funeral, depicting the prolonged struggles between police and mourners over a paramilitary burial. During the 1990s Duffy’s work became increasingly concerned with the deeper causes of the conflict in Northern Ireland, becoming increasingly multilayered in its combination of history, mythology, and literary sources. By 1997, and the collection entitled Banquet, the constant movement and teeming panoply of characters in earlier work had become greatly reduced; yet the increasingly monumental nature of the subjects of these paintings and drawings also belied a concern with more sinister meanings seemingly just below the work’s surface. Almost as a counterbalance, however, other more redemptive themes began to emerge that suggested the need to deal with the legacy of trauma in a post-conflict culture, itself built upon earlier moments of loss in Northern Ireland’s history. The fatal encounter of the Titanic with its iceberg becomes an allegory for more recent tragedy, whose resolution is hinted at in the photomontage Thaw (2003). In many of the works by Rita Duffy collected together here the paringdown of form and composition belies a depth of meaning. The isolation of the crumpled fabric of Cloth 1 (2006), abandoned on dirty ground, urges us as viewers to reach out beyond the painting’s surface in search of less readily available connections. The white hanky carried by Father Daly in the famous news photograph from Bloody Sunday, a futile gesture of pacification, has become one of the artist’s themes. In a collaboration with the poet Paul Muldoon the meanings of the handkerchief became much more allusive, the call and response of image and text setting up waves of resonance across the experience 38 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

of the recent past in Northern Ireland.2 Floating upon these depths are other objects, more threatening yet strangely seductive: a gun made out of chocolate, or another that makes promises unlikely to be kept. Landscape in these paintings is always contested territory, suggestive of danger even when it is at its most verdant, as in the lush suburban foliage surrounding the pink shell of the house of Eamon Collins, the IRA supergrass killed by republicans in 1999. Place in Northern Ireland bears the marks of recent occupations and those in the more distant past; in the painting Banquet (1997) temporal distinctions are collapsed together as the castellated walls of a twentieth-century security installation surround and protect a dining table and its chairs from the dangers outside. Yet even within the domestic domain, objects remain ambivalent; elsewhere a sofa bristles with indignation at the assumption of its role as an object of comfort. Homes are never as secure as they might be in Rita Duffy’s work. Clustered together among dark trees, the tiny buildings of Clearing (2002) evoke their historical antecedents when colonial settlements helped to clear the great forests of Ireland. Yet their vulnerability also prefigures the miniature houses of the sculptural installation Sleech (2009). Made of discarded bunting and human hair, the collection of these little objects suggests the close-knit communities of loyalist Belfast. The city’s foundations, however, are built on shifting alluvial deposits (also providing the name for this piece) that undermine the future of these areas as much through the erosion of certainty of belief as through postconflict urban renewal. In contemporary Northern Ireland, the ongoing presence of the past takes on many different roles, whether these concern the survival of entrenched ideas and beliefs that cling on resolutely to an existence in the face of social and political transformation, or the return of traumatic events apparently long distant. In Rita Duffy’s work the objects that embody these processes, the relics of past and present, have the power to become talismans; their painted presence encourages us to see the world with different eyes, to make the connections between past and present, and between Ireland and the world beyond. ¶

ENDNOTES 1 Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows (London: Bloomsbury 2009), 1. 2 Megan Johnston ed., Cloth: A Visual and Verbal Collaboration by Rita Duffy and Paul Muldoon (Portadown: Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2007)

Fionna Barber Rita Duffy’s Unquiet Relics | 39

Banquet (1997) oil on linen, 153 cm x 153 cm (collection: Banquet) [above] Relic (2001) oil on linen, 183 cm x 122 cm (collection: Cloth) [opposite page]

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Cloth 1 (2006) oil on linen, 137 cm x 107 cm (collection: Cloth)

Thaw (2003) still from film footage, Conor Kelly, Newfoundland (collection: Thaw)

Clearing (2002) oil on linen, 121 cm x 121 cm

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Eamon Collins House (2006) oil on linen, 183 cm x 122 cm (collection: Outposts)

Sleech (2009) flags and human hair, various dimensions

Romantic Irish Landscape (2004) oil on linen, 121 cm x 121 cm

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Sofa (1996) two-seater sofa, hairpins, wax, pigment and oil, 91 cm x 162 cm x 88 cm

Dessert (2001) chocolate and linen with lace, 92 cm x 95 cm x 6 cm

(collection: Banquet)

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Articles

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ABSTRACT

/ en / Ireland, widely acknowledged as having been dramatically transformed under the sign of the Celtic Tiger, is now assessing itself in relation to the austerity of the Post Tiger situation. In late twentiethcentury Ireland, after a long history of poverty and unemployment, Ireland became a hugely successful modern economy. After the global financial collapse, its property values steeply declined leading to the failure of the banks and a bail-out managed by the EU/ECB/ IMF troika. In the meantime, the culture of Ireland has been slowly changing in its everyday practices (eating, drinking, travelling, etc.) Do the changes in these cultural practices point to a change in what it means to be Irish? What is the relation between cosmopolitanism and consumerism, taste and being Irish? Drawing on Arendt, Blum, Oldenburg, Kiberd, and Banville, amongst others, this paper will apply radical interpretive theory and methodology to make sense of the changes, and the possibilities of meaning they raise. / fr / L’Irlande, dont on s’accorde à dire qu’elle a subi de profondes transformations pendant les années du Tigre Celtique, est en pleine auto-évaluation en cette période d’austérité. À la fin du XXe siècle, après des décennies de pauvreté et de chômage, l’économie irlandaise s’est modernisée et a enregistré des profits immenses. Après la crise

Kieran Bonner

Exciting, Intoxicating and Dangerous: Some Tiger Effects on Ireland and the Culture of Dublin

financière mondiale, les valeurs immobilières irlandaises se sont effondrées, ce qui a mené à la fermeture des banques et à un renflouement sous la tutelle d’une troika formée de l’Union Européenne, de la Banque Centrale Européenne et du Fonds Monétaire International. En même temps, la culture irlandaise a été transformée en profondeur dans sa pratique quotidienne (manger, boire, voyager, etc.). Ces changements de pratiques culturelles sont-ils révélateurs d’un changement de ce que veut dire être dublinois ? Quelle est la relation entre cosmopolitisme et consumérisme, entre le goût et l’identité irlandaise ? Faisant référence aux travaux d’Arendt, Blum, Oldenburg, Kiberd, Banville et d’autres, cet article appliquera une théorie et une méthodologie herméneutiques phénoménologiques pour offrir une explication et des interprétations de ces changements. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 37, no. 1-2 (2011). Special issue, “Culture and ‘Out of Placeness’ in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland, 2008-2013.” © 2013 CJIS and the author

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Ireland, widely acknowledged as having been dramatically transformed under the sign of the Celtic Tiger, is yet again assessing itself in relation to the austerity of the Post Tiger situation. Over the period of the Celtic Tiger years, Ireland went from being the poor cousin of Europe to being one of the richest, and most recently to being one of the most indebted.1 As the Economist put it: “After a long history of poverty and unemployment, the Irish thought they had finally transformed their country into a successful modern state. Now they find themselves saddled with staggering debts and an international bail-out.”2 The same writer says elsewhere: “This, remember, was a truly extraordinary story. The plot follows a satisfying rags-to-riches-to-rags narrative arc, with enough hubris and nemesis to satisfy the most demanding classicist. The cast of characters is superlative, featuring buccaneering bankers, outsized politicians and all-conquering property developers plus a few poor Cassandras. Even the locations are enticing, from rural beauty spots blighted by ‘ghost estates’ to high-end networking | 51

jamborees masquerading as racing events.”3 One Tiger track that appears to be longer lasting, however, is that while the pain of emigration has returned for native-born Irish, and many of the new immigrants have gone back to the nations of their origin, Ireland for the first time in centuries (if not in history) is the host to an non-Irish population, which now constitutes about 13.8 percent of the total population.4 As in virtually all other nations in the world, the phenomenon of multiculturalism is now an everyday reality, though Ireland went from a homogeneous to multicultural population in less than twenty years. What can now be said of the culture of contemporary Ireland? Michael Lewis, in his 2011 study entitled Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, noted that with the expansion of credit that characterized the worldwide boom and subsequent crash “the Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.”5 What does this mean? How can one interrogate this assertion? Such changes in demography, mobility, and affluence that Ireland experienced seem to have had their effect on the most fundamental practices of everyday life, especially in urban centers. We will see, below, evidence of a dramatic shift in certain social practices related to food and drink, most notably in modifying habitual taste preferences and in the reconceptualization of “third place” activities in such iconic sites as the pub and, in the case of Dublin, Bewley’s Cafés. During the Celtic Tiger years the Irish developed a taste for coffee, for drinking at home, for wine consumption, for eating out—in other words, they developed practices that were similar to those of their continental cousins. Are these mere shifts in trends—fashion—or are they symptomatic of more fundamental transformations in what might be considered the very essence of Irishness? Is it possible to explore how Dublin’s unique cultural profile, for example, fared in this Post Celtic Tiger onslaught? In his 1981 history of Bewley’s Cafés, Hugh Oram described the restaurants as one of the four pillars that made up the essence of Dublin, along with gas lamps, chiselers, and Guinness.6 During the boom the two landmark Bewley’s Cafés closed, leading to much debate and protest. Since then only the one on Grafton Street has managed to re-open. The seemingly ubiquitous Starbucks and TGIF now occupy what used to be the expansive Westmoreland Street location; the gas lamps and chiselers are gone, and the multinational corporation, Diageo, owns Guinness. What does it mean to examine the very practices that involve posing the question of who are the Irish, and what kind of methods are needed to rise to the measure of engaging that question?

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Theory, Methodology, and the Problem of Identity In 2000, an international SSHRC-funded research project entitled The Culture of Cities Montreal Toronto Berlin Dublin was organized around this challenging focus. While acknowledging that, just as there is a fundamental intangibility in attempting to respond to the question of the identity of a person,7 the task of understanding the culture of a city or a country must struggle with a deep indeterminacy involved in both the phenomenon of culture and the task of understanding. Drawing on methods made available by contemporary continental theory, this approach takes as case studies ethical collisions, issues that in ordinary everyday ways reveal the resources that everyday actors bring to resolving fundamental questions. For this radical interpretive perspective, such ethical collisions show culture as an “environment that dares to risk putting nihilism and its overtones into play as a vital part of everyday discourse … The aura of impermanence suggests that [a culture] is always on the verge of losing itself and so can always be approached as if poised for an ethical collision over the question of who and what it is, that is by the question of its identity.”8 The dramatic changes in both Celtic Tiger and Post Celtic Tiger Ireland are good examples of this aura of impermanence. What were these changes and in what way do such changes seem to raise the claim that the Irish wanted to stop being Irish? Who were the Irish and in what way did they change, such that they could be said to have been “on the verge of losing [themselves]”? Blum suggests that there is an element of daring in undertaking to embrace change, a daring that puts into play one’s very identity. This radical interpretive approach examines the ethical collisions raised by this debate as “a gloss of the recognition that the disappearance of the old and the emergence of the new appears in any present as contestation over the question of the revitalization of the [culture] as a form of life. This medley of hopes and fears which surfaces in any present in the mundane shape of local problem-solving is the material that [this] approach to the culture … aims to situate and represent.”9 Can we understand the Irish embrace of the boom as an expression of the desire for revitalization, which brings its own excitement and dangers? That is, and as Plato (The Laws) reminds us, is the self-confidence that is a requirement for revitalization also a pointer to the danger of intoxication? When culture is formulated in this way, standard conceptualizations show a relation but also a limitation. When culture is conceptualized as a “process

Bonner Exciting, Intoxicating and Dangerous | 53

of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,” or as a description of “the particular way of life of a people,” or as the “works and practices of intellectual activity,” a partial picture of culture emerges.10 Though the question of the development of a collective, or of the way of life of a people or even the works and practices of intellectual activity are all ways of conceptualizing culture, from the radical interpretive perspective these are understood to be material that is made subject to examination rather than essentialist descriptions. It is not a question of whether Oram has proven to be wrong or right in his description of the essence of Dublin. Rather his claim is read to make “reference … to the collective anxiety aroused by the power and mutual and reciprocal relevance of place to life and the impossible need to calculate answers to such questions.”11 The ethical collisions displayed by the discourse, both in the media and in everyday life, concerning the mundane local issues of Irish eating and drinking practices, serve as case studies enabling the examination of “the ephemera of … life” that “give rise to resolute interpretations and actions that upon serious questioning disclose traces of collective anxiety over indeterminacy and its uncanny persistence as a problem to be solved, the problem of how to be resolute in the face of the irresolute.”12 Rather than seeing the concern of Dublin or Irish identity as empty, or as an object that corresponds to definitive referents, the discourse will be treated as offering material (evidence) for examination that “upon serious questioning disclose traces of collective anxiety over” the indeterminacy of the category of Irishness as a practical and theoretical problem to be solved.13 The “words and language” out of which the image of the Irish in relation to changing eating and drinking habits will be constructed are drawn from a variety of sources—my “participant reflection” in the country of my birth and youth, through many annual and biannual return stays in the last thirty years; my experience of academic presentations and debates on the idea of Irish identity; my reflections on contemporary texts dealing with the period; my reflection on the notions of self formation and taste as these have been developed by Gadamer and Arendt; the application of the Blum and McHugh method of analysis through years of research; and so on. Newspaper reports, statistics, observations from travel magazines, social science studies, etc., are put into dialectical play against this background understanding. The arguments, reflections, discussions (academic and everyday) that surrounded the closing of Bewley’s Oriental Cafés were one such study for me.14

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Up for Sale – Bewley’s Oriental Café on Westmoreland Street. Photograph Kieran Bonner.

Through that study, it became clear that Dublin was struggling with its emerging identity as a cosmopolitan city, a cosmopolitanism that is in the process of dramatically transforming the city Joyce immortalized in Ulysses. As Declan Kiberd said of the centenary Bloomsday celebrations: “Bloom’s [Dublin] was an unplanned, ruralized but civic city. Soon the middle class would urbanize an entire civilization, whose architecture and shopping malls would be so completely planned that chance encounters became less and less possible … Dublin’s celebration of Bloomsday is really a lament for lost days when the city still seemed negotiable on foot rather than gridlocked by 100,000 private cars. The citizens in Joyce’s Dublin circulated in unpredictable ways.”15 The very streets of Dublin and Dublin itself served as a third place for Leopold Bloom. This was both Dublin’s charm and its dangerous oppressiveness. Kiberd’s sense of lament for a Dublin that is lost was not unlike the lament expressed when the Campbell Bewley Group Ltd. announced the closing of their flagship Bewley’s Cafés. In the first case, Dublin’s ruralized civic presence embodied in its streets


was defeated by the middle class suburbanization of Ireland. As we will see, the closing of the two flagship cafés has a more ambivalent sense to them. In both cases, however, contemporary changes in Irish culture brought about the death of a particular sense of Dublin and a particular sense of being Irish.

Irishness and Third Places One characteristic of Joyce’s Dublin is the presence of the pub as character and backdrop to the novel. Leopold Bloom famously mused in Ulysses that it would be a good challenge to try to cross the city of Dublin without passing a pub. While the Irish did not invent the pub, they made it the classic Irish third place, the place between work and home. In doing this, Dublin was fulfilling its identity by appropriating what it did not invent.16 In his book on the subject of third places, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Hair Salons and other Hangouts at the Heart of Community, Ray Oldenberg wrote: “In Ireland, where everybody deemed to have good sense frequents the pubs, pubs quite naturally are often used as informal offices. It is a practice to be encouraged, if for no other reason than the equality it established between the families.”17 For Oldenburg, the practice of frequenting the pub is an Irish way of displaying le bon sens, in that they made use of this third place for many functions. What is a third place? A “third place” is “a realm of satisfaction and social cohesion beyond the portals of home and work,” an “informal public realm.”18 It is a public space different from a regulated work environment, insofar as it is informal, but also different from the privacy of home insofar as it is public. And while the pub is the paradigmatic third place in Ireland, a third place develops wherever people regularly meet outside of work and home, as suggested by the title of Oldenburg’s book. For Oldenburg, the modern age has been characterized by the increasing dominance of the first two places, home and work, to the detriment of third places. For example, what was seen as unique about Irish drinking practices was that, unlike the rest of Europe, just about seventy percent of alcohol was consumed in the pub in Ireland. In his 2005 best seller, The Pope’s Children, the popular economist David McWilliams, in typically hyperbolic fashion, puts it thus: We love going out. Four drinks out of five are sunk in the pub. And, remarkably, when we don’t go out we don’t tend to drink heavily at 56 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

home. This contrasts with the rest of the world where people drink mainly in the privacy of their own home. We are exhibitionists … We like getting locked in public. In beer guzzling Germany, for example, only one third of all booze is drunk in bars. The Irish are desperately addicted to company as well as alcohol. We can’t stand being on our own.19 In the more sober language of a sociology textbook, Share, Tovey, and Corcoran state that because “three-quarters of alcoholic drink is consumed within the confines of a public house or pub [in Ireland] an understanding of the pub is therefore crucial to an understanding of Irish people’s relations with alcohol.”20 To these very contemporary authors, what defines Irish drinking practices in comparison with other cultures is the way it is shaped by sociability. On the one hand the pub is the symbol of “Irish people’s relations with alcohol,” while for McWilliams the pub instantiates a double addiction, to people as well as to alcohol. Yet, despite the confidence of these statements, made by McWilliams in 2005 and Share et al. in 2007, Irish drinking practices and their signifying relation to a third place were undergoing dramatic change. By December 2007 alone, according to Diageo figures, it was reported that public house consumption had dropped from seventy percent to forty-eight percent in just six years.21 Pub sales in the greater Dublin area were down forty percent in 2007 compared to 2006. That was not the only change taking place. “Beer accounted for just half of all sales of alcohol while wine continued its dizzying ascent in the list of favourite drinks to account for 22 of the overall market.” For the first time in Ireland off-licenses sold more drink than pubs in 2007. By 2011 “off-trade sales would … account for almost 60 of all alcohol consumed in Ireland.”22 As one reporter said: “Economic prosperity has transformed Flann O’Brien’s infamous ‘working man’ [and his pint of plain] into a harried office drone with a huge mortgage and a long commute. A crisp glass of Chablis in front of the widescreen is now the tipple of choice rather than the famed pint of porter in the cosy confines of a smoky bar.”23 The decline of the pub (in relation to its dominance as the primary site for the consumption of alcohol) began during the experience of unprecedented economic affluence. As we know, the irony is that alcohol consumption has not also declined. In the three decades from 1970 to 2000, there was a dramatic increase in alcohol consumption from seven litres per capita in 1970 to a high of 14.5 litres in 2001 to a fall to 13.6 in 2004.24 It has since fallen to just under twelve. Bonner Exciting, Intoxicating and Dangerous | 57

The pub as an Irish icon, therefore, is an ambivalent object, cathecting, as it does, images of good company, sociability, and conversation, in competition with images of male preserve and male irresponsibility, depressing atmosphere, and, of course, drinking excess and alcoholism. Thus Irish discourse on the decline of the pub reflects collective energies released that, for some, point to nostalgia and sociability, and for others, oppression and exclusion. Drinking habits in Ireland, which had been so incorrigibly resistant to European and North American drinking practices as to make them a feature worth noting, have, under the sign of the Celtic Tiger boom, been transformed. Is this just an incidental matter? From the point of view of the drinks industry, for example, it does not matter as long as consumption has not declined. For sociologists, however, the site for the consumption of alcohol does make a difference, insofar as it indicates the existence of vibrant third places. For Oldenburg, the pub, as the way the Irish signify their commitment to preserving third places, was something to be celebrated. With the rise of the suburbs and shopping centres, the car and long distance commutes, there has been a corresponding decline in vibrant third places. The decline of third places parallels and contributes to the decline of the city as a site of sociability, when people drive through the city from work to home and vice versa. The city street, rather than serving itself as a meeting area, or as the host of a variety of third places as it was with Leopold Bloom’s Dublin, now becomes a passageway. Home entertainment replaces third place entertainment and office cafeterias reduce the possibilities of serendipitous encounters with strangers. If the pub was the dominant third place in Ireland, Bewley’s Oriental Cafés were iconic exceptions. Frequented by all the great characters of Dublin, including Joyce, Behan, Flann O’Brien, and Kavanagh, it was one of Dublin’s great meeting places.25 Bewley’s stood out as a gathering place for the great and the small, the high and the low of Dublin. The closing of the two iconic coffee shops in Grafton Street and Westmoreland Street in 2005, in the middle of the boom, raised the issue of whether Ireland in general, and Dublin in particular, was in danger of losing its identity in its headlong rush to make the most of the Celtic Tiger boom. Interestingly, the loss-of-identity kind of talk has increased in austerity times, where the phrase (used by John Waters26 amongst many others) that Irish people “lost the run of themselves” during the boom times, references the experience Blum formulates as a risk of cultural re-vitalization. In retrospect, the arguments that emerged in relation to Bewley’s closing are

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something of a mirror image to the discourse that emerged in relation to the economic collapse. Where the former was a reflection from the midst of the boom on whether the newly found wealth meant the Irish had lost something essential about themselves, the latter is the sober reflection on how so many Irish could have given themselves so hubristically to the pursuit of wealth, bringing themselves and the country to the brink of bankruptcy. Do we not have here a good example of ethical collisions showing Ireland, as Blum puts it, as “an environment that dares to risk putting nihilism and its overtones into play as a vital part of everyday discourse?”27

The Bewley’s Case In 2008, in anticipation of a conference in the Mansion House in Dublin, Mary Russell wrote a piece for the Irish Times on the theme of Dublin coffee houses. “Three years ago, when he was lord mayor, Michael Conaghan lent his voice to the Save Bewley’s Café Campaign, which was a major factor in the reopening of the Grafton Street outlet. His in-tray was piled high with protests about the proposed closure of what is undoubtedly Dublin’s most famous coffee house. ‘The only issue which produced more mail was the visit to Ireland of George W Bush,’ he says.”28 Dubliners, it seems, were determined that this icon of the city would not go without a protest. Yet, what is particularly ironic about the fall of Bewley’s Oriental Cafés is that the iconic coffee house in Dublin failed during a boom in coffee consumption. It was once known as the place to go for coffee in Dublin, immortalized in the song “The Dublin Saunter,” about why Dublin is heaven.29 However, during the boom years it developed a reputation for poor quality coffee.30 As one Irish Independent report put it: Once we started getting proper Italian coffee in this country, we began to see how poorly the Bewley’s blend compared. It was never strong enough, the milk was too hot and it was percolated rather than expressed through one of those wondrous machines. Bewley’s died because nobody actually went into Bewley’s anymore … But they liked the idea of it. They liked to know it was there. “Turn left at Bewley’s,” they might say. Or “Meet you outside Bewley’s.” But go inside? No, they’d rather the little Italian place in the Powerscourt Centre.31


coffee in Dublin. For example, Mary Russell’s article refers to “the coffee shop in Dublin’s Camden Street … run by an Algerian” and where “French rather than American-style cappuccinos” are served.33

Post Celtic Tiger Practices In general, Irish drinking and eating practices changed during the years of economic boom. As well as developing a taste for coffee, many Irish developed a taste for drinking at home, for wine consumption, for eating out. Have these new consumption practices been maintained during the economic collapse or have they gone the way of property prices? Is austerity Ireland reverting to pre-Celtic Tiger practices? In fact, in relation to eating and drinking practices, the pattern established during the Celtic Tiger years has intensified.34 In an Irish Independent article with the provocative headline “Soon there will be more Oirish pubs than the real thing …” it was stated that

The Re-Opened Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street. Photograph by Kieran Bonner.

Bewley’s Oriental Cafés failed because Dubliners developed a taste for good Italian coffee and the Bewley’s blend fared poorly in comparison. The teadrinking Irish people were developing a taste for good coffee. As Dubliners became more cosmopolitan, as its citizens developed a taste for espresso, lattes, and cappuccinos rather than percolated coffee, the food of the ruralized past Kiberd refers to did not measure up.32 However, the reluctance to see Bewley’s close down showed ambivalence about the implication of jettisoning one’s past. This struggle with cosmopolitanism involves mediating between the meanings of the loss of the old in relation to the gains of the new. In this case, the choice of coffee and food has improved, as has the diversity of its inhabitants. In fact, the diversity of inhabitants is one of the reasons for the improvement of the choice of food and

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[i]f the current alarming rate of decline continues, Irish-themed pubs abroad will soon outnumber the real thing back home. “Faux” traditional Irish bars, complete with olde world charm, are springing up in places as diverse as Adelaide, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Hong Kong. But no sooner has a new one opened in the next exotic location, than time is being called on another pub in another Irish village. Latest figures reveal that over 1,000 pubs have closed since 2005. The decline has accelerated to almost one a day in the last two years with vintners predicting the free-fall will continue for the foreseeable future.35 Yet, the same article offers the following story about a positive development in the public house trade. A pub in Dublin without a pint of Guinness? Strange but true. The new owners of Mulligans in Stoneybatter are on a mission to develop the Irish beer palate, and it seems to be working. Sligo man Colm Hession, his Australian wife Seaneen Sullivan and friend Michael Foggarty, from Scotland, purchased the iconic but rundown landmark in the north inner city in July 2010. “We came with a thought of trying to do something completely different but also retaining the authenticity


of the old bar and grocer it once was,” explained Colm. With 17 taps of Irish draught beers with names like Trouble Dark Arts, Galway Hooker and Belfast Blonde, their commitment is to support Irish micro-brewing and provide customers with a wider range of products. “There is a growing population out there that are demanding quality, non-run-of-the-mill products. They are refusing to accept bland flavours and are looking for something more interesting and diverse that challenges the palate,” said Colm … Food is seasonal and locally sourced. Coffee is made in house from freshly ground beans. Even the tea bags are organic, whole-leaf and biodegradable. The upshot is that they have never been busier. “The day of the seven lads drinking pints at the counter all day are gone. Nobody does that any more. Our business is thriving on the fact that we are providing a good level of service, great food and interesting drinks to imbibe,” he said.36 Though the decline of the pub is lamented by many, that decline, at least according to Hession, is due to a change in drinking practices. “The day of seven lads drinking pints at the counter all day long are gone.” Again, as with the decline of Bewley’s, we recognize a call to live in the present, which means attending to good food and interesting drinks rather than custom and tradition. Let’s explore this further. In another Irish Independent article about the return of the “party spirit” to Dublin, journalist Jerome Reilly had the following story: In February [Joe Macken] opened Crackbird, an eclectic pop-up restaurant down a side alley at the unfashionable end of Temple Bar on Crane Lane. It was financed on his credit card for around 15,000 euro. To say it has been an astonishing success is an understatement. A quick interview at Thursday teatime was interrupted because the waitress needed a table for four, pronto. A steady stream of punters packed in for skillet-fried buttermilk chicken (9.95 euro per half bird) or super-crisp soy garlic chicken for the same price. Crackbird doesn’t serve chips, but a range of relatively healthy sides of potato salad, coleslaw, carrot and cranberry salad and couscous. It’s fast food with a college education.37 Commenting on the way Irish tastes have changed (primarily in Dublin), the owner said: “The people have changed. That brashness has gone, that national

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malaise. It was all flash, flash, flash, spend, spend, spend. That’s over now. We have an unbelievable cross-section of people coming in. It’s good food, but at the right price. People are embracing the recession in a way. But they are not about to curl up and die and not go out. It’s not our way,” he said.38 In retrospect, the excitement of the Celtic Tiger days now appears as “flash, flash, flash, spend, spend, spend.” And yet, the changes it augured in terms of eating and drinking practices have continued. You can have fast food but it must now be sophisticated, college educated. Thus while the pub, especially in rural Ireland, continues to decline and while the flash and spend era of the Celtic Tiger days are gone, there is a “growing population” “refusing to accept bland flavours.” How are we to make sense of these twin developments, the end of flash and spend but the growth of the demand for quality? Does this new sobriety39 signal an opportunity to critically reflect on the dangers of the relation between the desire for quality and the consumerism of the Celtic Tiger days?

Irish Consumerism Changes in Irish eating and drinking practices are reflective of modern international developments, especially as these relate to the Celtic Tiger. Critically understanding what is going on in Ireland means critically understanding modernity itself as a social and political development. Margaret Canovan writes that Hannah Arendt described the rise of the modern era as “the rise of the social” where “material interests became the collective concern of the whole nation and care of the state.” “In the twentieth century, as … consumption expanded, the same social traits had spread so far that entire populations were behaving like aristocrats from the ancien regime, devoted to conspicuous consumption, conforming to fashion, and obsessed with their social status.”40 As Arendt says: “It is frequently said that we live in a consumer’s society, and since … labor and consumption are but two stages of the same process, imposed upon man by the necessity of life, this is only another way of saying that we live in a society of laborers,”41 or as she puts it elsewhere, jobholders, whether that job be developer, banker, or politician. She goes on to say: the spare time of the [jobholder] is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites. That these appetites become more sophisticated,


so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities of life but, on the contrary, mainly concentrate on the superfluities of life, does not change the character of this society, but harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption. This rather uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the triumph the modern world has achieved over necessity is due to the emancipation of labor … and … as long as the jobholder remains in possession of [the public realm], there can be no true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open.42 While the Irish story of rags to riches to rags is more extreme than that of most modern countries, in its extremism it highlights what Arendt calls the consequences of the rise of the social realm in modern society. Arendt distinguishes between emancipation and freedom: emancipation is concerned with liberation from the oppression of the urgencies of life whereas freedom is concerned with the founding of a public realm where humans exercise their freedom through acting and speaking together about fundamental issues concerning who we are and what we should do.43 That is, acting and speaking need a public realm where they appear for their own sake and, simultaneously for the sake of that public realm. Outside of the public realm and in a social realm ruled by the jobholder mentality (“private activities displayed in the open”), acting and speaking are conceived of instrumentally, in this case for the sake of wealth or comfort or relief. In a New York Times op-ed piece, John Banville summarized the exhilaration that the promise of the emancipation from the urgencies of life opened: “There used to be a nice acronym that neatly expressed how the Irish people conceive of themselves: MOPE, that is, Most Oppressed People Ever. For a decade or so, when the Tiger was at its fiercest, we threw off the mantle of oppression, as once we had thrown off what used to be called ‘the yoke of British rule.’”44 Did the Irish, in seeming to throw off the mantle of oppression, not actually surrender to the illusion that oppressed peoples are subject to, the illusion that liberation from urgencies will bring happiness? “The ideal is not new,” Arendt says. It is “clearly indicated in the unquestioned assumption of classical political economy that the ultimate goal of the vita activa is the growing wealth, abundance, and happiness of the greatest number. And what else, finally, is this ideal of modern society but the age-old dream of the poor and the destitute, which can have a charm of its own so long as it is a dream, but turns into a fool’s paradise as soon as it is realized?”45

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Are the Post Celtic Tiger Irish in the process of absorbing this uncomfortable truth? That, as Banville remarked, “The wildest urban legends are readily believed. There is said to be a two-month backlog at the abattoirs, as families abandon the expensive pets, including thoroughbred racehorses, that they bought in the fat years and now can no longer afford to feed.”46 Is this an example of the arrival of the Irish on the stage of jobholders whose appetites became “greedier and more craving”? Does the absorption of this lesson go some way to provide an answer to the question many expatriates are asked about why the Irish are not out in mass on the streets rebelling against the IMF/EU/ECB imposed austerity cuts like has been seen in Greece and Italy? As stated by John Banville, the Irish searched for someone to blame: “Who is to blame for our sudden travails, we demanded—somebody must be to blame. The bankers? Them, certainly. The politicians? Well, the politicians are always to blame, so nothing new there. The markets, those shadowy entities that seem to operate by whim? Ourselves, perhaps? Now, there was a sobering possibility.”47 Banville’s opinion is echoed by Michael Lewis: “The Irish nouveau riche may have created a Ponzi scheme, but it was a Ponzi scheme in which they themselves believed. So too for that matter did some large number of ordinary Irish citizens, who bought houses for fantastic sums.”48 The Irish seemed to surrender to the craving and greediness of the jobholder mentality,49 a mentality that spreads danger for the public realm, including the third place described above.50 Arendt’s description of the behavior of aristocrats in the ancien regime being “devoted to conspicuous consumption, conforming to fashion, and obsessed with their social status,” is uncomfortably descriptive of the “flash, flash, flash, spend, spend, spend” practices of the Celtic Tiger days. If Post Celtic Tiger Ireland is in the process of absorbing this uncomfortable truth, does this promise the possibility that the Irish are getting some distance on the headiness of consumerism? If so, this also means coming to terms with the unquestioned assumption of classical political economy, the ideal of wealth, abundance and happiness.

Hopeful Possibilities Yet, we have already seen that the changing practices are more than a mirage. Not everything that happened during Celtic Tiger Ireland is a reflection of “flash, flash, flash.” On the contrary, these changes are so pervasive that it may be difficult to remember what life was like before the Celtic Tiger days.


For example, Banville described the “Ireland … his American wife, Janet, had first known in the 1970s.” Nostalgic for a hamburger, she had ordered one and a “thin gray thing” had arrived. “We had little apart from potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef then.”51 As he said in another article on restaurants (“one of civilizations most glorious achievements”): “Despite all the things the Irish share with the French—religion more or less, a truculent peasantry, antipathy to the English—we are not and never have been natural diners out.”52 Note the language: “never have been natural diners out.” Yet, compare this with a recent restaurant review by Paolo Tullio in the Irish Independent: We’ve been in the post-boom time for long enough now that we can see new trends emerging. There’s one I’ve spotted and it’s this: Irish restaurants are now doing what French and Italian restaurants did 30 years ago. They’re basing their turnover on their set-price menus. Let me elaborate; in both France and Italy eating out has been a part of daily life for centuries. It’s a habit; it’s enshrined as a major element of social interaction. Until recently, eating out in Ireland was for special events— it was for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and weddings. The 1990s and Noughties changed that for good. We now treat restaurants exactly as the continentals do. Our economic circumstances may have changed, but the habit of eating out has remained.53 That is, eating out, like the French and the Italians, seems now to have become an Irish eating habit. Can all of this be dismissed as fashion, à la Arendt? Is the new habit of eating out mere fashion in the sense of the way Arendt talks about it, a further expression of private activities displayed in the open or does it point to the possibility of an emerging orientation to the world and if so in what sense? The Irish have developed and continue to develop the French and Italian habit of desiring good food, good coffee, and good wine. What is interesting about this cosmopolitanism is the openness to the French and Italian habit of eating out. Food, wine, and craft beer, eating out—is this fashion too? Or does it point to a more permanent and hopeful (in the sense of the hope for the public realm) possibility?54 Despite the acknowledgement of the “madness” of the Celtic Tiger days, the surrender to excess that in retrospect characterizes the bubble, the Irish are

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not retreating to previous practices. Pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland and its icons, for the most part, are not longed for. Rather, the desire to be cosmopolitan that the Celtic Tiger instances, continues but now in a more muted fashion. In answer to the question of identity, the Irish are finding ways to express themselves through the desire for quality in food and drink. What is now exciting and intoxicating is the desire to meet in a third place that instances not only the joy of being together but is now mediated through the sophistication that a market makes possible. What does this tell us? The joy of being together that the third place embodies is sensitive to, even defensive regarding, the charge of parochialism and insularity. The ephemeral and fragile quality of sociability seeks a strengthening in the development of taste, the sense that when the craic is over, the taste for quality, for college-educated food that is developed through it survives. Though drinking and entertaining at home is now a feature of contemporary Irish life, and though wine as well as beer is comfortably consumed in Ireland as it is in most European countries, it does not look like Ireland has forsaken the third place. Again, going back to the owner of the new restaurant cited earlier: “People want to go out. They don’t want to spend a fortune, but as a people we are not going to stay in every night watching satellite TV,” said Joe Macken.55 The third place is being reshaped in Ireland but it is being re-shaped by the Irish interest in both sociability and in quality. Celtic Tiger Ireland invited European tastes (coffee drinking, wine consumption, restaurant going, dinner parties, etc.), and Mediterranean tastes in particular, into its culture. Its new-found wealth made it possible for Irish people to travel to Europe and experience these tastes, as well as importing these tastes in the form of restaurants, off-license wine tastings, cafés, and coffee shops. The tastes developed by the Mediterranean civilization were attractive to the Irish. Clearly, as already noted, many other objects (e.g., expensive pets) were attractive to the Irish, objects that in the sober light of the collapse show a surrender to the mad excess of consumerism. But, and this is the point being developed here, it looks like the Mediterranean tastes have held firm despite the economic collapse and the clear regret in the surrender to what was fashionable of many other actions. Does this give us a way to think about culture and identity? As Alan Blum says, the integrity of a collective is not really measured by its ability to be closed to outside influences. Rather “it is the relation to influences, the ways in which they are interpreted and engaged that is crucial. But,” he goes on to say in Nietzschean fashion, “what seems most important is the place of resistance, for it appears as if a people invite the influences by which they are attacked, in order to

Kieran Bonner Exciting, Intoxicating and Dangerous | 67

strengthen themselves.”56 If this is one way to think about contemporary Ireland, that it invited European influences in order to strengthen itself, then we need a distinction between mere fashion following and developing taste. In turn, is there a relation between becoming more civilized and taste?57 Fashion, according to Gadamer, “is indeed constituted by empirical generalness, consideration for others, comparison and seeing things from the general point of view … The phenomenon of taste is an intellectual faculty of differentiation … Taste operates in community but is not subservient to it … Against the tyranny exercised by fashion, sure taste preserves a specific freedom and superiority. This is its real normative power, which is peculiar to it alone, the knowledge that it is certain of the agreement of an ideal community.”58 Irish eating and drinking practices—practices that reveal a culture— changed significantly during Celtic Tiger Ireland. In Post Celtic Tiger Ireland, there is a general sense of re-evaluation of the excesses of these practices, as “flash, flash, flash, spend, spend, spend.” This points to the experience of the tyranny of fashion. The Irish are now, through austerity measures, coming to terms with the fashion (tyranny) of the property boom. However, as we have seen, the austerity of Post Celtic Tiger Ireland does not look like it means that the changes in eating and drinking practices are going to go the way of fashion, the changeable law that is its fate. Rather the cultivation, the Bildung, which is involved in the development of taste, points to something more permanent than the experience of being a fool with fashion, or Celtic Tiger madness. If these are changes in taste and not fashion, this points to cultivation, the development of a sense of judgment and confidence on one’s sense of judgment. This sense of judgment does not say that everyone agrees with me but that they should agree with me. As Gadamer says above, fundamentally this is to posit an agreement with an ideal community. “Kant,” according to Gadamer, “is quite right when he considers it better to be a fool in fashion than to be against fashion.” However, Gadamer adds, “it is still folly to take fashion too seriously.”59 Fashion is a taking-on of certain practices, mostly because someone else is doing it; fashion changes and particular styles become obsolete as people move onto another practice when that becomes fashion. What has happened with Irish food habits, however, is that they changed (initially motivated by the fashion of exposure to European practices) but are currently more than fashion because they have persisted despite the turn of fortunes post-Celtic Tiger. So Ireland in general, but Dublin in particular, changed in significant ways, as indicated by the presence of a population who

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are now more adamant about higher-quality cuisine. From the perspective of phenomenological hermeneutics, this change in taste indicates, as taste always does, an “ideal community.”60 What might this ideal community look like? What might we call on to point to this ideality? I have called on two quotations from two Irish writers. Among the many rich levels on which Brien Friel’s Translations operates, is the idea of the beautiful failure of the Irish interest in the culture of the ancient Romans and Greeks, as against the crude success of the British interest in imperialism, commerce, and trade. In that play, the hedge schoolmaster, Hugh, naively says to Captain Yolland: “Wordsworth? … No. I’m afraid we’re not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean. We tend to overlook your island.”61 Another Northerner, Seamus Heaney, speaking on the Lisbon vote said Europe was “more than a bureaucracy, it’s an ideal … The word ‘Europe’ is one of the first cultural underpinnings to our lives in this part of the globe. It’s for Greece, Italy, Rome, England, France that I feel it.”62 Do these citations help with the articulation of the ideal community concerning the change in taste that persists in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland? The culture of food, wine, craft beer, of eating out like the Italians and the French, points to the gap between the Euro as an economic union and the meaning of Europe as a civilization with which the Irish share solidarity. This beginning cultural solidarity can speak to our situation, if we engage it anew. That is, our way to that solidarity has in many ways to begin again, if the identity of the Irish as rural, Catholic, and nationalist has waned. In that sense and in contrast to the craving, fashion-following jobholder, developing a sense of taste means developing a political capacity to choose what the world should look like. But as we know, developing civility and taste is a process of self-formation. The development of civility involves “rational self-control and also crucially, taste, manners and refinement—in short sound education and polite manners … Civility requires working on yourself, not just leaving things as they are but making them over. It involves the struggle to reshape ourselves.”63 Charles Taylor is here talking about a moral order that developed in Europe during and after the Renaissance and Reformation, a moral order that the modern world now assumes but also one from which Ireland was marginalized. We know from Fintan O’Toole, amongst others, that Ireland may fail to pass the test in terms of the challenge of such re-shaping.64 The challenge for the Irish is whether they want to take up this work, to develop the nascent desire for the Mediterranean quality of life as a way to engage in cultural self-formation.


Kiberd, reviewing a book about the decline of pub culture in Ireland in general and Dublin in particular, wrote: “Joyce observed that Dublin would only truly be free when you could get a decent cup of coffee in every street.”65 Joyce, who immortalized Dublin, ironically represents the cosmopolitan side of Ireland. Though his Ulysses captured a more insular, slow-paced, ruralized Dublin, Joyce himself “over here dressed in Austrian yellow, spouting Italian by the hour, to O’Leary Curtis and John Wyse Power” symbolized the cosmopolitan impulse.66 Spurning the then fashionable Celtic Twilight, he lived in Europe and told the story of Dublin through the great epic poem of Homer’s Odyssey, along the way engaging and often parodying European literature. Yet, Joyce’s Dublin was not a city Joyce could actually live in. He was not and did not feel free there. Who knows what he would think of cosmopolitan Dublin? Or to put it another way, “if one aspect of postmodern thought is about the distinctiveness of place, the other aspect is a full-blooded cosmopolitanism—and the marvelous convenience of contemporary Ireland is that it meets both requirements at the same time.”67 ¶

4 Central Statistics Office, Ireland, Census 2011, Population classified by Religion and Nationality 2011, http://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/population/ populationclassifiedbyreligionandnationality2011. As this number excludes immigrants who have taken out Irish citizenship, it has been claimed that the figure is as high as seventeen percent. “In Year of Citizen We Must Bolster Migrants’ Rights,” Irish Times, December 28, 2012. 5 “The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told,‘The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.’ What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a heretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way.” Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 42; quoted in a book review by John Lanchester, “How We Were All Misled,” New York Review of Books, December 8, 2011. 6 Hugh Oram, Bewley’s (Dublin: Albertine Kennedy Publishing, 1981), 7.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my wife Margaret, who suffered through many iterations of this paper, those who responded to a version of this paper in Caen, and to its modified guise in the Irish Studies Seminar at Columbia University, Alexandra Slaby, my co-editor, who worked tirelessly for this special issue, and to our CJIS editor Rhona Richman Kenneally. Rhona responded very thoughtfully to this paper, made judicious suggestions in terms of phrasing and clarification, and asked crucial questions about method and theory, all of which added to whatever interdisciplinary clarity the paper can claim to have. ENDNOTES 1 See any of R. F. Foster, Luck & The Irish: A Brief History of Change c. 1970-2000 (London: Allen Lane, 2007); Tom Inglis, Global Ireland: Same Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 2008); Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane, Cosmopolitan Ireland: Globalization and Quality of Life (London: Pluto Press, 2007); Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (London: Faber and Faber, 2010); Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (London: Faber and Faber, 2009); Morgan Kelly, “What Happened to Ireland?,” Irish Pages 6, no. 1 (2011): 7-19. 2 “Ireland’s Crash: After the Race,” The Economist, February 17, 2011. 3 “Haven’t They Noticed There’s a Recession On?,”The Economist, February 18, 2011. 70 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

7 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 8 Alan Blum, The Imaginative Structure of the City (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 234-35. 9 Blum, Imaginative Structure of the City, 195. 10 Raymond Williams paraphrased by Perry Share, Hillary Tovey, and Mary P. Corcoran, A Sociology of Ireland, 3rd ed. (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2007), 339. 11 Blum, Imaginative Structure of the City, 12. 12 Blum, Imaginative Structure of the City, 12. 13 The methodology of the paper follows phenomenological hermeneutic principles, which assert that everything known requires a knower and that all knowledge (scientific, humanistic, journalistic, theoretic, practical) is mediated. In particular, the relation between human consciousness and the encounter with the world happens through language; this means that the understanding of all objects is necessarily already pre-structured along certain lines, whether those lines be everyday, journalistic, scientific, or humanistic. From this perspective there is no neutral, ahistorical, or ‘objective’ understanding. The world and the language we use to understand the world are inextricably intertwined, whether in social science studies, novelistic reflections or the journalistic reports. “It is in words and language that things come into being and are.” Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 135.


14 Kieran Bonner, “A Fry-up and an Espresso: Bewley’s Café and Cosmopolitan Dublin,” New Hibernia Review 11, no. 2 (2007): 9-20. 15 Declan Kiberd, “Bloom in Bourgeois Bohemia: A Moment of Perpetual Possibility for Joyce – and for Dublin,” Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 2004, 15. 16 “Fort of the Dane / Garrison of the Saxon, / Augustan capital / Of a Gaelic nation, / Appropriating all / The alien brought, / You give me time for thought.” Louis MacNeice, “Dublin,” in The Closing Album I, Dublin, August -September 1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1979). 17 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place : Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through The Day, 2nd ed. (New York: Marlowe, 1999), xxvi. 18 Oldenburg, Great Good Place, 9. 19 David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2006), 8. 20 Share, Tovey, and Corcoran, Sociology of Ireland, 387. 21 Carrisa Casey, “Last Orders for Our Ailing Pubs,” Irish Independent, December 6, 2007. 22 Ciarán Hancock, “Drinks Industry Indicates Sales Flat as Consumption Declines,” Irish Times, April 26, 2012. 23 Casey, “Last Orders.” 24 Share, Tovey, and Corcoran, Sociology of Ireland, 386. 25 See Bonner, “A Fry-up and an Espresso.” 26 John Waters, “When Lack of a Skinny Latte Turns World Awry,” Irish Times, February 27, 2009. 27 Blum, Imaginative Structure of the City, 235. 28 Mary Russell, “Reviving the Fine Art of Cafe Culture,” Irish Times, October 21, 2008. 29 Lyrics for “The Dublin Saunter”: “For Dublin can be heaven / With coffee at eleven / And a stroll in Stephen’s Green.” 30 See Bonner, “A Fry-up and an Espresso.” 31 David Robbins, “Let Bewley’s Rest in Peace,” Irish Independent, November 27, 2004. (Also in Bonner, “A Fry-up and an Espresso,” 49.) 32 As one business analyst put it, “Time and ground rents move on. As for the cappuccino classes, they moved on ages ago.” Quoted in Robbins, “Let Bewley’s Rest in Peace.” (Also in Bonner, “A Fry-up and an Espresso,” 50.) 33 Russell, “Reviving the Fine Art of Cafe Culture.”

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34 “One in eight of the country’s pubs have closed in the past six years, an investigation by the Irish Independent has revealed. New figures show how the recession, rural depopulation, lifestyle changes and the drink-driving offensive have contributed to the demise of over 1,000 pubs since 2005. The number of closures is expected to accelerate further in the coming months, with even stricter drink-driving limits being introduced and government cuts set to further slash consumer spending. Revenue Commissioner records obtained by the Irish Independent show the country had 8,617 pubs in 2005, at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom. However, the number of pubs has fallen by 1,108 to just 7,509 this month.” Treacy Hogan, “1,000 Pub Closures Since 2005,” Irish Independent, October 24, 2011. As this report indicates, two crucial factors that go some ways to explaining the continuing demise of the pub were the introduction of the ban on smoking (which is popularly supported), the strict drink-driving limits and the strict enforcement of such. The specific issue of the demise of the pub is the subject of another paper. For here, suffice it to say that the “web of interweaving causes” (as Max Weber would describe it) play into the simultaneous development of alternative drinking practices. 35 Anita Guidera, “Soon There Will Be More Oirish Pubs than the Real Thing …,” Irish Independent, November 5, 2011. In my own home town of Kitchener, Ontario, a town built by German immigrants, two local pubs have been re-branded as Oirish pubs by local business people who do not have any Irish connection or background. In this light when I mentioned to a colleague that I was presenting my talk on the “Europeanization of Irish drinking and eating,” he questioned whether “it is not more the Cultural Irishization of Drinking in the Western World?” The globalization of Ireland, it seems, has had a corresponding global development of Irishization of Drinking. Globalization and glocalization mirror each other in the twenty-first century. 36 Guidera, “Soon There Will Be More Oirish Pubs.” 37 Jerome Reilly, “There’s a Spring in Our Step as Capital Spirits Rise,” Irish Independent, April 24, 2011. 38 Reilly, “There’s a Spring in Our Step.” 39 “These are sober times in Ireland, as the nation, so well known for its bonhomie, seems somewhat underwhelmed after the slide of its economic wellbeing.” “Irish Sobriety,” Euromoney.com, November 2010. http://www.euromoney.com/ Article/2710881/Irish-sobriety.html 40 Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118-119. 41 Arendt, Human Condition, 126. 42 Arendt, Human Condition, 133-34.


43 Arendt, Human Condition. 44 John Banville, “The Debtor of the Western World,” New York Times, November 18, 2010. 45 Arendt, Human Condition, 133. 46 Banville, “Debtor of the Western World.” 47 Banville, “Debtor of the Western World.” 48 Michael Lewis, “When Irish Eyes Are Crying,” Vanity Fair, March 2011. 49 “Many of the people who did stupid things … did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on … The Irish who bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told by builders and bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity.” Lanchester, “How We Were All Misled.” 50 “‘What happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing,’ Mr Kenny told a meeting at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. ‘The extent of personal credit, personal wealth created on credit was done between people and banks—a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash.’” Derek Scally, “Taoiseach Blames Crisis on ‘Mad Borrowing’ and Greed,” Irish Times, January 26, 2012. 51 John Banville quoted in Gini Alhadeff, “Surprising Dublin,” TravelandLeisure. com, February 2011. 52 John Banville, “Dining with the Tiger: Ireland’s Restaurant Bubble,” Harpers Magazine, July 2011, 83-88.

58 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Truth and Method (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 35-36. 59 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 35. 60 The claim of this article now means that Lewis must be seen as only partly right in regards to his Boomerang claim that the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. From the perspective of the Renaissance sense of civility or even Foucault’s idea of the care of the self, the change can be seen as a development of the self or culture, a cultivation as it were. To see these changes as examples of not wanting to be oneself is a claim based on a static perspective. From a more dynamic dialectical perspective, the changes can be seen as a response, as a result of an exposure to practices in continental Europe, to the recognition (by some at least) that one’s refinement, manners, and taste, could be developed. 61 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 417. 62 Henry McDonald, “Seamus Heaney Launches Fierce Attack on Irish Opponents of Lisbon Treaty,” The Observer, September 13, 2009. 63 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 38. 64 O’Toole, Ship of Fools. 65 Declan Kiberd, “A Lament for the Local,” Irish Times, April 4, 2009. 66 James Joyce, “Gas from a Burner,” in The Portable James Joyce with an introduction and notes by Harry Levin (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1947), 661. 67 Terry Eagleton, foreword to Dublin: A Cultural History by Siobhan Kilfeather (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), x.

53 Paolo Tullio, “Paolo Tullio at McHugh’s Wine and Dine, Dublin,” restaurant review, Irish Independent, June 4, 2011. 54 “All in all, then,—love of interpretation—has two parts, or rather one whole from which one part may be separated: (1) Love of the whole body of interpretation, of ambiguity-artifice-demonstration-freedom-need-pleasure-enjoyment; (2) love of the particular which is the pleasure of artifice.” Peter McHugh, “Insomnia and the (T)error of Lost Foundationalism in Postmodernism,” Human Studies 19, no. 1 (1996): 34. 55 Reilly, “There’s a Spring in Our Step.” 56 Blum, Imaginative Structure of the City, 120. 57 “Ordered government was one facet of [Renaissance] civity, but there were others: a certain development of the arts and sciences … The development of rational moral self-control and also, crucially, taste, manners, refinement – in short, sound education and polite manners.” Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 38.

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ABSTRACT

/ en / International comparisons of public cultural expenditure since 2008 and an assessment of the impact of the last recession on the Irish cultural sector show that culture has been relatively severely affected by the current recession which reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the Irish cultural economy. The strengths (exportable cultural goods) are being put forward as growth enablers and contribute to the economization of culture, understood as the commercialization of the cultural sector which becomes subsumed into economic policy. The weaknesses exposed by the recession and by consideration of the global cultural policy agenda are the absence of compensation mechanisms for dwindling State support. Measures are being taken to address that absence, which co-exists with an enduring cultural exceptionalism but which may nevertheless jeopardize the public-good remit which had so far been at the core of cultural policy.

Alexandra Slaby

Whither Cultural Policy in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland?

/ fr / Les comparaisons internationales en matière de dépenses culturelles publiques depuis 2008 et une évaluation de l’impact de la dernière crise sur le secteur culturel irlandais montrent que la culture a été relativement durement touchée par la crise actuelle qui révèle les forces et les faiblesses de l’économie culturelle irlandaise. Les forces (biens culturels exportables) sont mises en avant comme facteurs de croissance et contribuent à l’économisation de la culture, entendue comme la commercialisation du secteur culturel qui se trouve absorbé dans la politique économique. Les faiblesses révélées par la crise et par la comparaison avec les priorités des politiques culturelles mondiales sont l’absence de mécanismes de compensation face à la baisse du soutien de l’Etat. Des mesures sont prises actuellement pour combler ce manque qui coexistent avec la promotion d’un exceptionnalisme culturel persistant qui peut néanmoins mettre en péril la mission de protection du bien commun qui était jusqu’à présent au cœur de toute politique culturelle. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 37, no. 1-2 (2011). Special issue, “Culture and ‘Out of Placeness’ in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland, 2008-2013.” © 2013 CJIS and the author

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Cultural provision is one of the areas of Irish life where the benefits of the Celtic Tiger years are the least disputable. Between 1994 and 2008, Arts Council funding rose by 400. European Structural Funds corrected the serious geographical imbalances in the access to cultural facilities across the country by financing a comprehensive network of state-of-the-art cultural venues.1 It became desirable for politicians to be seen to be involved in cultural projects. That context encouraged artistic creativity, as attested by the exponential growth each year of applications for Arts Council funding. Cultural offer was lavish, sometimes exceeding demand.2 Then came the blow: in October 2008, it was announced that overall cultural expenditure would be reduced by almost just under 10, the Arts Council’s grant by 12, and the budget of the national cultural institutions by 20. National cultural institutions might be merged.3 In December, it appeared that on average, organizations would lose 8.2, that dance and literature would be the most severely hit, with the Irish Writers Centre losing its Arts Council grant entirely.4 Anxiety about the future of public support for the arts climaxed with the publication of the socalled McCarthy Report5 in July 2009 recommending drastic cuts to cultural

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expenditure, the discontinuation of the Irish Film Board as a separate entity, and even of Culture Ireland—the arm’s length organization promoting Irish culture abroad—and of the Department of Arts.6 Those recommendations bode ill for the future of the public funding and support of culture in Ireland.7 They implied nothing short of the undoing of a cultural policy which had been institutionalized in 1993, when the Department of Arts, inaugurated by Michael D. Higgins, made culture an autonomous area of public policy. Cultural policy was defined for the first time by Higgins according to theories of ethical memory and citizenship based on the works respectively of Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and Raymond Williams, whereby facilitating access to culture meant facilitating access to a more representative and complete historical narrative and facilitating participation in the Habermasian public sphere.8 Policy documents and reports published between 2008 and 2012 by the Irish Department of Arts and the Arts Council, as well as comparative data from a selection of countries, will enable us to assess the transformational effect of the recession on the rationale of cultural policy. Once the Irish cultural funding cuts and policy decisions have been placed in a global recessionary cultural funding environment, it will then appear that the mainstreaming of culture into the economy, which has been on the cultural policy agenda of other countries, has affected Ireland no less, but later, and differently. The consequences of that economization of culture—understood as the commercialization of the cultural sector, which becomes subsumed into economic policy9—are already visible and throw into question not only the nature of the culture to be supported, but also the public-good remit of cultural policy.

Cutbacks to the Irish cultural sector in international perspective The severity of the blow to the Irish cultural sector announced in late 2008 must be assessed against the general impact of the recession in Ireland and against the treatment of culture in other recessionary economies. The strategy behind the cuts is also to be understood in the context of a cultural policy agenda that has emerged in Britain and Europe. A look at the issues of the Quarterly Economic Commentary published by Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute between 1994 and 2012 shows that gross domestic product (GDP) growth dropped from an average of 9

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between 1994 and 2000 to -5.5 in 2009, before rising again to -0.8 in 2010 and reaching 1.8 in 2013. In the meantime, house prices had fallen by 43 in 2011 from their 2007 peak and unemployment remained at 14.8 in 2012.10 The sacrifices made by the population out of work or paid lower wages have not been totally in vain however: thanks to the decrease of labour cost, Ireland has regained its competitiveness on the export market and is hoped to be able to exit its bailout program at the end of 2013. However, domestic demand remains flat, and Ireland is heavily reliant on exports (which amount to 70 of its GDP) and on the international economic conjuncture, which will have repercussions on the choice of cultural forms to be supported. Beyond the initial tremor sent across the cultural sector in 2008, public cultural funding has predictably been affected quite significantly by this context. Between 2008 and 2013 indeed, the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid fell by 35.2 and total cultural expenditure by the Department of Arts by 26. However, the Department has remained in existence and plans further, but milder cuts in total cultural expenditure ranging between 15 and 20 between 2012 and 2014. Public funding of the arts and culture in Ireland 2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Department of Arts Cultural Expenditure (€m)

122

182

204

200

166.5

123

118

129.6

125.4

Arts Council Grant-in-aid (€m)

66.2

72.3

83

81

73

65

63.1

59.9

69

Sources: Annual Reports of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Arts Council

Ireland is not the only country where cultural funding cuts and decisions have been drastic. In 2012 in the Netherlands, overall cultural spending was cut by 25, while Portugal abolished its Ministry for Culture.11 Elsewhere, however, as in Great Britain and the United States, compensation mechanisms have been put in place. In Great Britain, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport reduced its grant-in-aid to Arts Council England by 21.25 between 2008 and 2011 (19.75 in Ireland). In 2011-2015 furthermore, cuts in culture and sports are planned to reach 25-30, with culture being the worst hit.12 In Ireland, the reduction of the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid has been slightly smaller, as well as the projected cuts in overall cultural spending. It must be said, however, that in Great Britain, National Lottery contributions come to compensate for the

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decrease in the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid, even if they constitute a voluntary and hence unpredictable source of additional income. In other countries such as the United States, arts funding at state level also dropped by 25 in 2012,13 but to compensate for that fall, the federal government raised its contribution between 2008 and 2012 by increasing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) appropriation from $144.7 million in 2008 to $167.5 million in 2010, before letting it drop again to $146 million in 2012 when state and local levels of funding rose.14 Beyond mere compensations, other countries actually report increases in arts funding, sometimes even throughout the recession. It is true that at one stage during the recession, the Irish Department of Arts did increase its overall cultural expenditure by 8.95, but that was only between 2011 and 2012, while Germany’s federal budget for culture increased constantly during the last decade up to 2011. In 2009, France allocated an extra €100 million to the Ministry of Culture; an extra €30 million was also given to the performing arts, and €70 million invested in a program to support museums all over the country. Not to mention China, where investment in culture is increasing by 23 each year, thirteen hundred art and design schools began construction in 2009, and five thousand new museums are being planned in 2013.15 The Council of Europe / ERICarts’ Compendium of Cultural Policy Trends in Europe 2012 shows that out of twenty-five countries, ten suffered cuts in their overall arts and culture funding, five saw their funding unchanged, and ten actually received increases.16 Put into perspective, even if Ireland did not lose its Department of Arts, Irish cultural funding cuts seem relatively substantial, all the more so in the absence of compensation mechanisms. Indeed, unlike Britain, the National Lottery’s contribution to the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid has not been raised so as to compensate the decrease in funding from the Department. Also indicative of the historic dimension of the funding cuts in Ireland is that even during the previous recession in the 1980s, which saw GDP growth fall from 8.21 in 1977 to -0.43 in 1986, the Arts Council’s grant-in-aid not only did not fall but actually increased five-fold (from £1.2 million to £5.9 million). The level of current cuts suggests that this recession has transformed attitudes towards the public support of culture. The overall diminishing direct state contribution to cultural funding and the emergence of such compensation mechanisms in some countries (lottery, fiscal incentives for private giving) point to new conceptions of cultural policy emerging in Great Britain and Europe. In Great Britain, cultural policy makers

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oversaw the transition to an economized cultural policy long before Ireland. The Greater London Council, which was the first public body to formulate a cultural policy for London in the 1980s before the creation of the Department of National Heritage in 1992, extended for the first time the scope of culture beyond the arts to include cultural industries. As early as in the 1990s, British Arts Council reports started using the word investment rather than subsidy, with value for money and economic impact put forward. At the same time, these reports announced the move from the restrictive and meaning-laden cultural industries which have to account for their cultural component, to the more neutral creative industries, making a “creative turn” in the history of cultural policy in the Western world.17 New Labour then placed the creative industries18 for the first time at the core of cultural policy as soon as it came to power in 1997 through the creation of a Creative Industries Task Force and the publication of a policy document called Create the Future.19 The creative turn was soon embraced in Europe where the adoption of the Lisbon Agenda by the European Council in 2000 signaled the continent’s commitment to becoming “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.”20 Seeking to translate that goal into cultural policy, the European Commission’s report The Economy of Culture in Europe, published in 2006, acknowledged that although the “cultural and creative sector” was growing and developing at a higher pace than the rest of the economy, its role in fostering growth and employment was still largely ignored.21 Just when the missing link between culture and the economy needed to be understood, Richard Florida, an American consultant and professor of Management, stepped in with The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) in which he announced the fulfillment of the social forecasting Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell had made thirty years earlier—the coming of an age when prosperity would derive no longer from industry, but from the growth of a “knowledge class” or “creative class.” 22 In 2009, in a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy entitled “After the Creative Industries,” Jim McGuigan exposed the flaws in Florida’s definitions of the “creative class” (so broad as to include the whole professional-managerial class, of which the really creative element makes up only 10) and of talent (the possession of a college degree) and therefore of his arguments, showing that “America’s management guru” writes with an approach informed by consultancy and with an urban-regeneration agenda in mind.23 And yet, despite the questions raised as to whether “this loosely-defined set of economic activities has generated the full range of commercial, social and


cultural benefits so widely claimed,”24 Florida’s work has been taken seriously by cultural policy makers and scholars. For example, in 2007, Britain’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport published a study (Staying Ahead, an economic analysis of the creative industries in Britain, which defines creative industries as producing “expressive value”) citing Florida as an inspiration.25 In 2008, another research report by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) entitled Creating Innovation: Do the Creative Industries Support Innovation in the Wider Economy?, and policy documents by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport entitled Creative Economy Program and Creative Britain continued to try and substantiate the claim that the arts and related activities could play a role in stimulating original thought and creativity in the wider economy.26 While the terms cultural and creative industries were coined in Britain, they were relayed globally and given a central role in shaping the future of cultural policies. For example, methodological reservations and missing logical connections notwithstanding, the creative turn in cultural policy has been embraced enthusiastically in Australia, where the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, has produced scholars such as Justin O’Connor and Stuart Cunningham, who place this turn in “evolutionary economics” and theories of cultural democratization, and who argue that the creative industries exemplify a particular kind of market—a social network market—in which the false opposition of economic and cultural values is dissolved within “highly complex, adaptive systems.”27 The recession renewed the emphasis on these new cultural forms as growth enablers. In 2010, the European Commission published a Green Paper entitled Unlocking the Potential of Cultural and Creative Industries, which reiterated the relevance and necessity of investing in the cultural and creative industries to create growth and jobs.28 That these industries are poised to dominate cultural policy in Europe is suggested by the establishment in 2011 of an EU Expert Group on Cultural and Creative Industries and the drafting of a Digital Agenda for Europe 2010-2020, which seeks to foster an Innovation Union.29 It is always difficult to make international comparisons concerning public cultural funding, because funding structures differ from country to country. What does appear, however, from international comparison of cultural funding cuts during this recession is that Ireland is in need of a structural transformation of its cultural economy that would introduce new sources of funding. Also, as Ireland is so dependent on exports to stimulate the growth of its GDP, it is

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inevitable that policy makers will search for growth enablers in the cultural sector. As this search is driven by global agendas and accelerated by the recession, the following section will see to what extent the role of the Irish State is being transformed in its public-service mission of supporting culture.

The contours of Irish recessionary cultural policy An examination of cultural policy priorities in Ireland before the recession reveals a different agenda from that informing cultural policy in Great Britain and the European Union—an agenda dominated first and foremost in the 1980s and 1990s by the assessment of needs in basic cultural provision across the country.30 Under Ireland’s first Minister for Culture Michael D. Higgins, in the 1990s Irish cultural policy concerned itself with issues of access and identity, first of all promoting indigenous cinema and media for cultural and ideological reasons—fighting against “the colonization of the imagination.”31 The priority was to increase access, to share the cultural awakening with as large an audience as possible: indeed, in 1983, a research report had revealed that 40 of the Irish population did not attend any arts or cultural event in the past year, and among those 40, 39 had no knowledge or appreciation of the arts whatsoever.32 That decade was also one of historic commemorations, which provided an encouragement to focus on Ireland’s relationship to its history and heritage through celebrations and festivals.33 Until the mid-2000s, Irish cultural policy was essentially focused on the delivery of public service of culture. The economic rationale was almost absent, apart from the commission of two reports on the cultural (not creative) industries and their economic potential in the second half of the 1990s.34 The early 2000s marked a turning point towards a new approach of cultural funding in Ireland. The economic impact of culture was beginning to be measured.35 The economy of culture was encouraged to become mixed; cultural policy makers started calling on the private sector to contribute to the support of culture. A new Arts Plan was commissioned to monitor progress on the diversification of funding sources recommended by a report in 1998.36 Ireland was following Britain in that trend, but only belatedly. Indeed, as early as in the 1980s, in the face of cuts to the British Arts Council’s funding, policy documents had promoted the move from an age when the state was the main benefactor to an age when it would become one of many funding sources,37 and emphasized value for money and the alleged contribution to the wealth of the


nation, a claim underpinned by economic impact studies from the mid-1980s on.38 Almost ten years after its British counterpart, the Irish Arts Council started referring to investments rather than subsidies in its annual reports from the mid-2000s. Significantly, the Arts Plan 2002-2006 was abandoned and replaced by a Partnership for the Arts whereby the Arts Council was to mentor arts organizations to help them market themselves to private investors. At the same time, the Department of Arts’ annual report in 2008 included plans to develop philanthropy and private giving.39 Another step towards the economization of culture, which this time differentiated Ireland from Britain, was the association of culture and tourism in the same government department (Arts, Sports and Tourism) between 2002 and 2011. A cultural tourism policy emerging from the synergy between the two sectors was sought.40 Cultural policy was to be further subsumed into a cultural tourism policy when a cabinet reshuffle in 2010 saw the Department renamed yet again—as Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport—and given the mission “to enrich Irish society by supporting the growth of a competitive and sustainable tourism industry and increasing access to and participation in sport, the arts and culture.”41 It was only in 2009, however, that Irish cultural policy became explicitly economized, in that it was not just encouraged to contribute to economic growth but was to acquire an active role in leading the economy to a new stage: the “smart economy.” The government policy action plan Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal published in 2009 included items from the European agenda: Ireland must become competitive again, and a key component of that competitiveness is its capacity to export and to attract foreign investment.42 Exports are indeed the key growth enabler, representing 70 of GDP in Ireland, and compensating for a flat domestic demand. Action Area 2 of the Smart Economy document places an onus on culture to “Build the Ideas Economy” and create “the Innovation Island” so that Ireland can become “the innovation and commercialization hub” of Europe. To that end, incentives for investment must be maintained; that investment will be targeted not only towards the key arts and cultural infrastructure, but also towards the cultural and creative sector, and a synergy will be developed between cultural industries, tourism, and the wider economy. However, nowhere in this policy document are cultural and creative sector and creativity defined. Commissioned to make suggestions as to how to implement this new policy, a report published in 2009 on the economic impact of the arts in Ireland revealed that the economic impact of the creative industries (not more formally defined but presented as including

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software and even advertising) in particular was far more significant than any other area of culture and that they may play a role in the future prosperity of the Irish economy.43 Cultural and creative industries are valued at 7 of the world’s GDP and their forecasted growth per year is 10. Ireland has an advantage in the creative sector which contributed 3.5 of the Irish economy in 2005 (significantly more than the 2.6 figure for Europe).44 The creative industries are expected, therefore, to contribute significantly to boosting Ireland’s exports and thereby to fostering growth and bringing about recovery. The defining moment in the overt economization of cultural policy was the Global Irish Economic Forum, which convened for the first time in Dublin in September 2009 (Farmleigh I) and brought together stakeholders from the worlds of business and the arts and from the Irish diaspora to help deliver on the Smart Economy agenda and find ways to promote “the Innovation Island” and “Brand Ireland” abroad.45 A follow-up meeting (Farmleigh II) took place in October 2011. As the Irish wondered how to restore their image abroad, concrete proposals insisted that there was a need to reduce costs to regain competitiveness and boost exports. Bill Clinton offered advice on crowd-funding, while Bono quoted Richard Florida. Only on entering its recession, it appears, did Ireland begin to focus no longer on its domestic cultural access priorities, but started following foreign and global cultural agendas calling into question the publicservice rationale of cultural policy in favour of its economization. It is time now to see to what extent these recommendations have been implemented by Irish cultural policy makers. The first and most ostensibly recessionary cultural policy decision made by the Arts Council to reduce costs and regain competitiveness was the proposed rationalizing or amalgamation of boards and other resources of cultural institutions. Following a recommendation by the Fianna Fáil government in the Budget of 2009, the Department of Arts contemplated merging the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), the National Gallery, and the Crawford Gallery, and proposed that the Heritage Council and Culture Ireland be incorporated into the Department of Arts. The plan would also see the boards of the National Library and National Museum amalgamated. Amid much criticism within the cultural institutions and in the press, the new Fine Gael Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan defended the case for these mergers in light of the rationalization of state agencies imposed by the Public Service Reform Plan of the Government published in 2011.46 These institutions are not only to be rationalized but also to diversify their funding sources with


the help of new advisory councils with a focus on philanthropy. To save costs, too, the new Minister put a temporary end to the long drawn-out discussion about relocating the Abbey Theatre by announcing that it would remain at its current location. The Arts Council also participated in the effort to save costs by developing a selective funding policy, investing in the economically soundest organizations rather than applying a uniform reduction overall. When the funding cuts were at their harshest, in 2010, thirty groups lost State funding, the Abbey Theatre lost €1.1 million of its grant, Temple Bar Galleries and Studios had to cancel their exhibitions, and the Association of Irish Composers and Concorde Contemporary Music Ensemble had their funding cut completely.47 Meanwhile, cultural and creative industries now featured for the first time in an Arts Council policy document—Developing the Arts in Ireland: A Strategic Overview 2011-2013.48 Particularly noteworthy is that gaming entered the scope of publicly supported culture: set to grow by 50 in 2011-2014, an investment the Chairperson of the Arts Council embraced.49 In 2010, the Arts Council set up a Cultural Technology Grant Scheme and soon after, a Culture App (Dublin Culture Trail), along with a “satnav for the arts” (Culturefox), was created. In the summer of 2011, as a representative of the Irish cultural sector was appointed to the European Union’s Expert Group on Cultural and Creative Industries,50 the Arts Council reiterated its commitment to “creating synergies” between “the arts and associated creative industries”51 and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht published Creative Capital: Report on Building Ireland’s Audiovisual Creative Economy.52 The National Gallery of Ireland soon followed the trend by holding a symposium on “Future Gazing” about the use of digital media in museums. In less than two years then, Ireland had taken the creative turn and caught up with Great Britain by giving “creativity” a central role in the evolution of cultural policy. Creativity thus defined can serve for “image rebranding,” the third pillar of Irish recessionary cultural policy, following the decision of former Taoiseach Brian Cowen acting on the recommendations of Farmleigh I to commission a major arts festival of film, theatre, music, dance, and literature in the United States. That was Culture Ireland’s “Imagine Ireland” campaign in 2011, sending a thousand artists to stage works across two hundred cities in the United States, which was to be followed by a similar campaign in Europe (“Culture Connects”) scheduled for the first half of 2013 to coincide with the Irish Presidency of the European Union. As cinema and television also have an important role to play to rebrand Ireland’s image, and partly as a result of the advocacy of the National Campaign for the Arts, set up in 2009 to campaign against the recommendations 86 | CJIS Vol. 37, No. 1+2

of the McCarthy Report, Fianna Fáil ministers of Arts, Sports and Tourism in 2009 and 2010 decided to retain the Irish Film Board (which actually saw its budget increased by 7 in 2009),53 and Section 481 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, which incentivizes film-makers to shoot films in Ireland. Investment in film saw its tax relief raised from 80 to 100 in 2009. The Irish Film Centre began major redevelopment. As a result, 2010 was described in the Irish Times as “one of the busiest years ever for the Irish film industry.”54 The prospects of Irish cinema continue to be good: “The level of tax relief available to the Irish film industry will increase by about 15 after 2015, according to new provisions in the Finance Act.”55 Ultimately, on top of the mergers, rationalizations, and the unprecedented attention given to “image branding,” the most notable transformation of Irish cultural policy in these recessionary times has been the concrete and accelerated implementation of its shift towards a mixed economy of cultural funding. In 2011, at the second meeting of the Global Irish Economic Forum, Jimmy Deenihan called on the private sector to be more involved in the arts and make up for the 15 drop in government funding.56 To develop individual giving, a new private micro-patronage, or crowd-funding, mechanism designed in New York was introduced in Ireland in 2011.57 A Philanthropic Leverage Initiative was also introduced by the Department of Arts in 2012 which exceeded its target, generating €4.26 for every €1 invested by the taxpayer,58 while the Arts Council launched a parallel program called “Raise” whereby organizations are chosen to receive assistance in raising €250,000 each per year. Those measures which have just been introduced have already been met with some success and are set to secure more firmly than ever the place of private and philanthropic funding in the economy of culture in Ireland. It appears then that although some elements of the economization of culture were already present in the Irish cultural agenda before 2009, the recession, and especially the arrival of a Fine Gael government in 2011, accelerated their implementation. The funding structures and the contents of the funded culture have changed. The boundaries of the arts and cultural sector supported by the State have been blurred to extend to forms of expression devoid of any artistic or cultural intentionality, such as software or advertising. As for the beneficiaries of cultural policy, the focus on exportable cultural goods and image branding, and the new voice given to the Irish diaspora point to a foreign rather than a domestic public to be served. Less than twenty years after Ireland fought along with France for the notion of “cultural exception” at the European level59 and the defense of the public service of culture, Irish cultural policy is undergoing Slaby Whither Cultural Policy in Post Celtic Tiger Ireland? | 87

a profound transformation calling into question the very notion of a cultural policy. Can we indeed still talk about a cultural policy when the cultural content has become optional, and when the State is no longer the main stakeholder? And what becomes of the public-good remit when “art ceases to be about citizens and becomes about sponsors?”60

Implications and prospects for Irish cultural policy The recession has required some temporary adjustments, as in the case of rationalizations and pooling of resources in cultural institutions that had been the greatest beneficiaries of the Celtic Tiger cultural policy. At a deeper structural and conceptual level, it has given new and lasting orientations to Irish cultural policy, which this section will seek to identify. The first aspect of cultural policy which is threatened is its public-service remit, as cultural policy is no longer coterminous with the public support of culture. Adapting to global cultural policy trends, the fifth International Conference on Cultural Policy Research in 2008, and a subsequent special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy devoted to a “New Understanding of Cultural Policy,” felt the need to define cultural policy in a new way as “the promotion … of cultural practices and values by governments, corporations and other institutions and individuals.”61 In their support of culture, “corporations and other institutions and individuals” are, however, under no obligation to serve the public by enabling access to as wide an array of cultural practices as possible. Meanwhile, lack of interest in the public as recipients of cultural policy is revealed by the absence, since 2006, of any reports or policy documents about public participation in the arts. The Arts Council also only published one policy document about cultural diversity (2009), and the only report available on the arts and social inclusion was published by another organization in 2007.62 This evolution raises some important questions as to the future of a public cultural policy. A semi-privatized cultural policy is not without dangers for Ireland. The mixed economy model of cultural funding, which is presented by comparative research reports as successful in Great Britain and in the United States, may not be directly transferable to Ireland. Indeed, this diversification of sources is not facilitated by legal and fiscal arrangements as it is in Britain and the United States. In 2006-2007, Business to Arts, Ireland’s leading organization fostering

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partnerships between arts organizations and businesses, undertook research on private investment in the arts, and published a report on the topic in Ireland in 2008. It turned out that only 21 of cultural organizations dedicated fulltime staff to fundraising and only 40 part-time staff. It appeared too that the private investment received was mostly from businesses (80) with very little (4) coming from foundations, trusts, or endowments. Individual giving was also much lower (16 of total private investment) than in Great Britain (55). The recommendations made in that report were for arts organizations to hone their fundraising skills.63 Also, a former economist with the World Bank recommended that individual giving (where the fastest increases are) be incentivized by removing the minimum size of eligibility (€250) to avail of the tax exemption. Indeed, in Great Britain, 70 of individual donations are less than £100.64 However, even if fiscal arrangements are envisaged for individual donations in Ireland, the problem remains that in general, private investment is fickle, even in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States. Private giving indeed doubled in Great Britain between 2001 and 2011, but in 2009 it decreased by 7 from the previous year when it represented 26 of overall cultural funding.65 Finally, the British example shows that cultural access and the quality and range of the cultural offer may suffer in the mixed economy model, as the majority of private investment in culture goes to London and to major or large organizations. By introducing private (corporate or individual) interests in cultural policy making, governments contribute to reducing the shared “cultural space,” to borrow former Minister of Arts Michael D. Higgins’s driving concept.66 Supporting cultural and creative industries implies supporting the individual consumption of cultural goods and drastically reduces cultural policy’s historic remit to conserve and display. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt put it in “The Crisis of Culture”: These things [art objects] obviously share with political “products,” words and deeds, the quality that they are in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen; they can fulfill their own being, which is appearance, only in a world which is common to all; in the concealment of private life and private possession, art objects cannot attain their own inherent validity, they must, on the contrary, be protected against the possessiveness of individuals.67


Alain Finkielkraut would say against the transition of “culture” to “my culture.”68 The price to pay for culture and cultural policy is high.69 Several issues of the International Journal of Cultural Policy have explored the path now taken by Irish policy makers from cultural to creative policy and highlight the implications of this evolution.70 One of its implications, identified by an Australian cultural policy scholar, is the shift from a “sovereignty model” to the “software approach,” from cultural policy as the attempt to establish a national or at least a shared culture among its citizens, to the creation of cultural infrastructure to sustain the economy.71 The promotion of creativity frees cultural policy-makers from the increasingly burdensome notion of culture, which is inherently value-driven and has become problematic in a postmodern world. The next (post-creative) stage of this evolution in Ireland may be that cultural policy is to be absorbed into a broader innovation policy, which will further blur the boundary between creative and non-creative, cultural and industrial,72 perhaps leaving a residual cultural policy to deal with cultural tourism.

2011 general election campaign all continue to promote a “unique,” “exceptional” culture to be preserved and promoted. As observers of Celtic Tiger culture Finbarr Bradley and James J. Kennelly note, in the official understanding, culture is rooted in a “social and cultural capital, sense of place and national identity” while being promoted as the best (even if still unproven) way to “nurture innovation and competitiveness.” Culture, they note, has become “neither a commodity nor an industry sector, but a multifaceted and complex national resource that drives the creation of economic value.”75 Identity-related issues and the questioning of nationalism are besides poised, as in the 1990s, to return to the foreground of Irish cultural policy with the entry into the 2010s, called the “Decade of Commemorations.” The recent economization of Irish cultural policy offers a perfect illustration of the replacement identified by John Coakley of “traditional ‘Irish Ireland’ ideals with an equally nationalist paradigm which [is] entrepreneurial, open to the outside world, [and] agnostic on cultural matters.”76 More than an illustration, it may even be a catalyst. ¶

Conclusion ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Irish cultural sector has not collapsed as expected, but Irish cultural policy has undeniably undergone deep transformations since the mid-2000s. The Arts Council sees itself no longer as subsidizing cultural organizations but as investing in cultural corporations, and no longer as assisting artists but as mentoring managers, while discussions of quality or diversity of artistic contributions have been replaced by discussions of value for money. Meanwhile, the scope of the culture supported at government level has expanded beyond the broadest definition of the word ever articulated in intellectual history. Such a broad culture, “de-differentiated” from the economy, Maynooth Professor of sociology Michel Peillon predicted, is meant “no longer [to] provide a basis for the critique of society.”73 In this issue, Pat Cooke exposes indeed the mechanisms presented as innovative measures favorable to the cultural sector but which have in fact neutralized cultural critique.74 Although one would expect the compelled adherence to European and British cultural policy agendas during the recession to neutralize the singularity of Irish attitudes towards culture, it appears that the coexistence of the economization of culture with an enduring promotion of a cultural exceptionalism endorsed by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael remains. Party manifestos published for the

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I would like to thank Kieran Bonner and two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating and constructive feedback. ENDNOTES 1 The €389,935 million of European Structural Funding was channelled in Ireland through the Tourism Operational Program which, in the second half of the 1990s, oversaw the development of national cultural infrastructures. This Program also partially financed the Cultural Development Incentive Scheme (CDIS), under which €26.4 million was allocated to develop thirty-eight cultural venues throughout the country. Between 1994 and 1997, capital expenditure rose by 92. This program was taken over by the ACCESS program (Arts and Culture Capital Enhancement Support Scheme) which ran from 2001 to 2004 and continued to support the development of a network of cultural institutions across the country. This program was extended under the name of ACCESS II (2007-2009) to enable, with the allocation of €32 million, the refurbishment of thirty-seven existing cultural infrastructures. See European Commission, Données par Etat-membre sur l’utilisation des fonds structurels dans le domaine de la culture, Annexe 2 (February 2004), 136-41, http://ec.europa.eu/culture/key-documents/doc/funds_ structural2.pdf


2 Gemma Tipton, “All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go?,” Irish Times, May 22, 2010. 3 Deirdre Falvey, “Festivals, Jobs May Go as Arts Funding Slashed”, Irish Times, October 15, 2008. 4 Deirdre Falvey, “Funding for Arts Organizations Will Fall 8.2 Next Year,” Irish Times, December 20, 2008. 5 Colm McCarthy, et al., Report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes, vols. I and II (Dublin: Government Publications Sales Office, 2009). 6 In this paper, we will use the generic name of the Department of Arts to refer to the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism (2002-2010), the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport (2010-2011) and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (since 2011).

Times, May 29, 2009; Irina Bokova, “La culture pour sortir de la crise … Oui mais comment?” Le Monde, December 18, 2012. 16 Council of Europe / ERICarts, “Monitoring Public Cultural Expenditure in Selected European Countries 2000-2010/11,” Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe (2012). http://www.culturalpolicies.net/web/statistics-funding. php?aid=232&cid=80&lid=en 17 Arts Council of Great Britain, Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century (London: Arts Council Great Britain, 1990); A Creative Future: A Way Forward for the Arts, Crafts and Media in England (London: Arts Council Great Britain, 1993).

7 The cultural sector is understood here as the art forms and institutions supported by the Department of Arts and the Arts Council of Ireland.

18 The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) “defines the creative industries as comprising advertising, architecture, the art and antique markets, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing software and computer services, and television and radio.” John Holden, Publicly-Funded Culture and the Creative Industries (London: Arts Council England, 2007), 8.

8 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981).

19 DCMS, Creative Industries: Report on the Creative Industries Finance Conference: Connecting Creativity with Capital (London: DCMS, 2000); Labour Party, Create the Future: A Strategy for Cultural Policy, Arts and the Creative Economy (London: Labour Party, 1997).

9 Andrea Ellmaier, “Cultural Entrepreneurialism: On the Changing Relationship between the Arts, Culture and Employment,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 9, no. 1 (2003): 3-16.

20 European Council, Conclusions of the European Council meeting in Lisbon, March 23 and 24, 2000 (“Lisbon Strategy” or “Lisbon Agenda”), para. 5. http:// www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/lis1_en.htm

10 Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Quarterly Economic Commentary (1994-2012). 11 Larry Rochter, “In Europe, Where Art is Life, Ax Falls on Public Financing,” New York Times, March 24, 2012. 12 Council of Europe, Steering Committee for Culture, “Results of a 2011 Survey with Governments on Culture Budgets and the Financial Crisis and Culture,” (CultureWatchEurope survey), 10th Plenary Session, May 3-4, 2011, 4. http:// www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/culture/cdcult/Plenary_Session/Session10_ mai11/04add_EN.pdf 13 Americans for the Arts, Arts Facts… Government Arts Funding (2012). http://www.americanforthearts.org/pdf/get_involved/advocacy/research/2012/ govt_funding12.pdf 14 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Arts Appropriation History http://www.nea.gov/about/budget/ AppropriationsHistory.html 15 Laure Kaltenbach and Olivier Le Guay, “La culture nous sortira de la crise,” Le Monde, March 3, 2012; Arminta Wallace, “No Time for Faint Arts,” Irish

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21 European Commission, The Economy of Culture in Europe, Executive Summary (2006), 1. http://ec.europa.eu/culture/pdf/doc895_en.pdf. The “cultural and creative sector” represented 7 of the world’s GDP, a 10 growth per year, and 19.7 of EU growth for 1999-2003; its growth was estimated to be 12.3 higher than that of the general economy. 22 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 23 Jim McGuigan, “Doing a Florida Thing: The Creative Class Thesis and Cultural Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 3 (2009): 291-300. 24 Mark Banks and Justin O’Connor, introduction to “After the Creative Industries,” special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 4 (2009): 365. 25 DCMS, Staying Ahead (London: The Work Foundation, 2007), 114. 26 NESTA, Creating Innovation: Do the Creative Industries Support Innovation in the Wider Economy? (London: NESTA, 2008); DCMS, Creative Economy Program (London: DCMS, 2008); DCMS, Creative Britain (London: DCMS, 2008).


27 Justin O’Connor, “Creative Industries: A New Direction,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 4 (2009): 387. 28 European Commission, Unlocking the Potential of Cultural and Creative Industries, Green Paper (2010). http://ec.europa.eu/culture/documents/ greenpaper_creative_industries_en.pdf 29 European Commission, Digital Agenda for Europe http://ec.europa.eu/digitalagenda/ 30 Richard Sinnott and David Kavanagh, Audiences, Acquisitions and Amateurs: Participation in the Arts (Dublin: The Arts Council, 1983); Donald Herron, Deaf Ears? A Report on the Provision of Music Education in Irish Schools (Dublin: The Arts Council, 1985). 31 Michael D. Higgins, keynote address, conference on “Irish Film – A Mirror Up to Culture,” Virginia Centre for Media and Culture, Charlottesville, May 9, 1996. 32 Sinnott and Kavanagh, Audiences, Acquisitions and Amateurs, 6, 13. 33 Nomination of Dublin as Cultural Capital in 1991; 400th anniversary of Trinity College Dublin in 1992; 150th anniversary of the Famine; 80th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1916; festival “L’Imaginaire irlandais” in France in 1996. 34 Temple Bar Properties and Coopers & Lybrand, The Employment and Economic Significance of the Cultural Industries in Ireland, with assistance from An Comhairle Ealaíon/The Arts Council, the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, An Bórd Trachtála, Dublin Corporation and FÁS (Dublin: Temple Bar Properties, 1994); Forte Task Force, Access All Areas – Irish Music an International Industry, Report to the Minister of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1997). 35 The Arts Council, The Creative Imperative (Dublin: The Arts Council, 2000). 36 Indecon International Economic Consultants in association with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Succeeding Better: Report of the Strategic Review of the Arts Plan 1995-1998 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1998). 37 Ruth Blandina M. Quinn, “Distance or Intimacy? The Arm’s Length Principle, the British Government and the Arts Council of Great Britain,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 4, no. 1 (1997): 127-59. 38 Arts Council of Great Britain, Partnership: Making Arts Money Work Harder (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986); The Arts: Politics, Power and the Purse (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987); John Myerscough, The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1988). 39 Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism, Statement of Strategy 2008-2010 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2008), 22.

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40 This synergy was evidenced by the organization by Fáilte Ireland of a National Tourism Conference entitled “Cultural Tourism: An Asset, an Opportunity” in 2008 and a Cultural Tourism Initiative in 2009 to further integrate cultural attractions into to tourism marketing programs. 41 Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Annual Report (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2010), 3. 42 Department of the Taoiseach, Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2008). 43 Indecon International Economic Consultants, Assessment of Economic Impact of the Arts in Ireland: Arts and Culture Scoping Research Project (Dublin: The Arts Council, 2009). http://www.artscouncil.ie/Publications/Arts_Council_-_ Economic_Impact_-_Final_Report.pdf 44 Ibid., 25, 11. 45 See the website of the Global Irish Forum: http://www.globalirishforum.ie/ Programme.aspx 46 Jimmy Deenihan, “Lack of Funds Means Cultural Bodies Must Do More With Less,” Irish Times, June 11, 2012. 47 Deirdre Falvey, “Arts Organizations to Discuss Severe Funding Cutbacks,” Irish Times, February 6, 2010. 48 Arts Council, Developing the Arts in Ireland: A Strategic Overview 2011-2013 (Dublin: The Arts Council, 2010). 49 See interview of Arts Council Chairperson Pat Moylan by Joanne Hunt, “Arts Council Chief Fits the Bill When the Going Gets Tough,” Irish Times, June 3, 2011. 50 Gráinne Millar, Head of Cultural Development at Temple Bar Cultural Trust. 51 Arts Council, “Arts Council Says Farmleigh 2 Should Commit to Supporting the Creative and Cultural Industries,” press release, July 5, 2011, http://www. artscouncil.ie/en/media.aspx?article=bbe54ab2-5442-4579-a794-58878e6faf15 52 Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Creative Capital: Report on Building Ireland’s Audiovisual Creative Economy (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2011). 53 Gerry Smyth, “Measuring the Impact on the Arts,” Irish Times, April 11, 2009. 54 Sinéad Gleeson, “Light, Camera, Irish Action,” Irish Times, June 21, 2011. 55 Ronan McGreevy, “Tax Relief Changes Will See More Money Going to Film Industry,” Irish Times, February 18, 2013. 56 See Ronan McGreevy, “Minister Eyes Corporate Cash for the Arts,” Irish Times, October 10, 2011.


57 Called Fundit.ie, it solicits the public to support ideas submitted by artists, with rewards in it for them. David O’Dwyer, “A New Way for Art to Take Flight,” Irish Times, March 8, 2011. 58 Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, “Deenihan Announces Details of 2013 Philanthropy Initiative,” press release, February 17, 2013, http://www.ahg.gov. ie/en/PressReleases/2013; Ronan McGreevy, “Joint Scheme Raised Over €1m for Arts,” Irish Times, February 18, 2013. 59 Former Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht Michael D. Higgins and his French counterparts Jack Lang and Jacques Toubon defended public service media in Europe during the GATT negotiations. See Alexandra Slaby, L’Etat et la culture en Irlande (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2010), 94; or Alexandra Slaby, “Avant-propos” to Michael D. Higgins’s lecture at the Sorbonne on February 18, 2013, reprinted in Etudes Irlandaises 38, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013): 1-3. 60 Fintan O’Toole, “Fundraising Frustration? The Minister Has a Wizard Scheme,” Irish Times, December 8, 2012.

71 Terry Flew, “Sovereignty and Software: Rethinking Cultural Policy in a Global Creative Economy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 3 (2005): 243-60. 72 Banks and O’Connor, introduction to “After the Creative Industries.” 73 Michel Peillon, “Culture and State in Ireland’s New Economy,” in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. Peadar Kirby (London: Pluto Books, 2002), 46-47. 74 Pat Cooke, “The Artist and the State in Ireland: Artist Autonomy and the Arm’s Length Principle in a Time of Crisis,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 37, no. 1-2 (2011). 75 Finbarr Bradley and James J. Kennelly, Capitalising on Culture: Competing on Difference (Dublin: Blackhall Publishing, 2008), 167, 356. 76 John Coakley, Changing Shades of Orange and Green (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), 129.

61 Jeremy Ahearne and Oliver Bennett, introduction to International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 2 (2009): 132. 62 Daniel Jewesbury et al., Cultural Diversity and the Arts: Final Report (Dublin: Arts Council, 2009); National Economic and Social Forum, The Arts: Cultural Inclusion and Social Cohesion (Dublin: NESF, 2007). 63 Business to Arts, Private Investment in Arts and Culture (Dublin: Deloitte, 2008). 64 Timothy King, “Tax System Must Encourage Funding of Arts by Enthusiasts,” Irish Times, December 17, 2012. 65 See the study of (UK) Arts & Business’s annual Private Investment in Culture surveys by Tina Mermiri, “Private Investment in Culture: The Sector In and PostRecession,” Cultural Trends 20, no. 3-4 (2011): 257-69. 66 Michael D. Higgins, “Cultural Policy: The Need for a New Approach,” keynote lecture at “Move Culture to Centre Stage,” European Symposium, Stockholm, September 17-18, 1997. 67 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis of Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 218. 68 Alain Finkielkraut, La Défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 16. 69 Kate Oakley, “The Disappearing Arts: Creativity and Innovation after the Creative Industries,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 14, no. 4 (2009): 403-13. 70 See “Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy,” special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 1 (2005); a few articles in IJCP 14, no. 3 (2008); “After the Creative Industries,” special issue of IJCP 15, no. 4 (2009); “Creativity and Cultural Policy,” special issue of IJCP 16, no. 3 (2010).

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