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John McGahern Seminar Weekend 16

th
May 2014

Thank you for inviting me to give the opening address at this years John McGahern
seminar weekend. It offers me a selfish opportunity to try and tease out some of my
thoughts and opinions on current cultural debates in Ireland.

It was also a fantastic opportunity to reacquaint myself with Johns writing and in
particular his essays and short stories. This is what has largely informed my talk this
evening. I also realised that while I was writing this in my office in the Seanad what
was peering down at me from above on the wall was Colm Hogans wonderful
photographic portrait of John McGahern and his dog taunting me mischievously.

I knew John McGahern, the man, before I really understood his work. That the
visceral experience of reading his novel Amongst Women only started to have an
impact on me, as I grew older, gained some experience in the exciting and
challenging work of raising a family and understanding a constantly complicated and
complex Ireland. It became a kind of slowreleasing catharsis for me. The other
important thing I realised about John McGahern is how ruthless and single-minded
you have to be to achieve your goals as an artist.

There can be no compromise, no equivocation and no ambiguity as to how an artist, a
writer might produce, create, slog, abandon, re-write, defend, argue, fall-out, relent,
sustain, anger, rage, or rue the process of making an art work Any art work And I
think John McGahern managed this through most of his published work. This body
of work is compact, clear-minded, controlled and precise McGahern never over-did
it, essays, memoirs, a small pocket of reviews, his short stories and his legacy is still
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that his writing offers us a way in to an understanding of national history, local
communities and individual humanity.

He also took care of his sentences as I heard him say himself and advised others to do
the same I can see that he managed his creative energy well during this life and it
seems to me, anyway, that he didnt panic (or just didnt show it) with some of the
publishing gaps between his work and the critical or non-critical response to his
writing. Maybe that was the ruthlessness or single-mindedness of the artist or
maybe just resilience. I think that rearing cattle helped too!

Im not an artist; I am what can be called, despairingly sometimes, an arts
administrator. A sometimes necessary eunuch; a kind of useful, full-time, paid,
connector of artist to audience. Sometimes getting it right, often mis-firing, mis-
hearing, mis-calculating, mistaking. Im also a citizen who wants to contribute
constantly to Irish society through my work in the arts. - As you know, Im a Senator
too and in a privileged position of not having being elected but constitutionally
nominated by An Taoiseach. And since I dont have the courage to stand for
election or the endowment of being an artist, I have found it an enormous privilege
to have worked with some of the best artists in Ireland over the last 25 years. I am
satisfied and clear, that my work in the Arts might make a modest, slow-release,
contribution toward a more diverse, better informed, politically stimulated society,
whereby creativity is seen as essential and respected, and hopefully enhance a more
complete model of citizenship.

My daily activity is dependent on my understanding of the role and the attempts of
ensuring that the artists work, (whether its a play, film, exhibition, piece of music) is
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seen by as many people as possible and that whatever about the artist, that the work,
not only is protected and celebrated as widely as possible, but that it is presented in
the proper context. That is what a producer is meant to do.

I am 50 this year and I realise that I have been involved in the arts in one way or
another for over 25 years I have achieved all kinds of things from running a
national theatre, to making movies and TV dramas, to advising a Minister for Arts, to
running the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar, to opening an Irish Cultural Centre in
Paris, to running international festivals be it in Washington DC, Hanover, Sao Paulo
or New York. The reason I am laying out all of these dodgy achievements to you
this evening is so that I can attempt, with your indulgence - some kind of
understanding of what I have learned about the role of the artist in Irish society and
how arts and culture stand in relation to the State in 2014.

As I have just said the reason I am still working in the Irish arts world is that I want
to make a difference or a contribution to Irish society, even change it or influence it
someway. It is through working with artists that I could do this. I believe, that
artists are prophets ( explain further) Sometimes, they might not know this and
that is okay but the burden an artist can carry in what they create, and how they
create matters they sing that song that can offer an extraordinary insight into the
psychic imagination of our country or nation. They can tell the truth and often
challenge establishment in a way that is brave (sometimes kind) but often brutal
as the narrator in McGaherns The Country Funeral explains, when the brothers
are confronting each other:

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There are no things more cruel than truths about ourselves spoken to us by
another that are perceived to be at least half true. Left unsaid and hidden we feel
they can be changed or eradicated, in time.

That the true role of any good artist and it applies of course of Marina Carr, as it is
does to Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Eavan Boland, Frank McGuiness, Clare Keegan,
Sebastian Barry Belinda McKeon, Mark ORowe, Vincent Woods, Donal Ryan and
John McGahern himself.

Not every piece of writing by McGahern achieves that prophetic status artists dont
often, always, achieve a catharsis; a clear movable, moving sense of being an urgent
understanding of what we are about they dont have to, cant (more likely) achieve
this all the time.

That is what Francis Hardy in Brian Friels FAITH HEALER wondered, challenged
and ultimately accepted he had no choice, actually. Once can be enough, it might
only be once. We were fortunate that McGahern gave us many opportunities to face
that truth he spoke about in The Country Funeral.

An artist can produce a body of work through their whole life-time and not achieve
what some critics might call a hit or that horrible word masterpiece the lexicon of
the marketplace or celebrity culture - but that is why we need to support and sustain
the work of artists in Ireland through good and bad times, but also to understand
how important an artist is in his local community none of these writers did it in one
go!

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No amount of revisionism is going to make it an easy narrative for us to see a linearly
successful trajectory for any artist but we as audiences, readers, viewers and
producers have to support them, love them, forgive them and pay them. Because
the hard, tough role of the artist is to make sense of the world this often means that
they bite the hand that feeds it. In this case the State, or the taxpayer, or the citizens;
they have to do this in order to seek a truth of ourselves or offer the sense of our real
and imagined and altered reality.

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

I think that a writer in our society, whatever nationality he or she might be, must,
as a writer, refuse to represent any kind of ideological interests, any aesthetic or
political dogma, even if it marginalises him or condemn him to obscurity. Every
writer has to establish for himself his own aesthetic principles; dogma and
prejudgements must be excluded from his world

So when I speak of the role of the artist in Irish society or indeed the role of culture in
Irish society, I take heed of the paradox that is innate in creating art. At one point the
artist is set away from his or her community in writing or creating art, and the
paradox is that without that community the artist wont have an audience, a
readership or a connection. The risk and perhaps the result is that inevitably artists
might regularly be, as McGahern says marginalised Always a paradox.

My interest is how can art and artists be central more central in Irish society than it
has been since 1916 An artist has a profound duty only to his/her work yet it is
that work which can be placed in a political or social context which itself can be
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advocating for a just and better society, or at the very least helping us to understand
what is happening around us in our communities.

We dont have the tradition in Ireland of an artist as overt commentator not in the
same way as in England, Scotland or France. In those lands there is a tradition of the
artist as critic or public intellectual which sits, regularly in opposition to, or in
judgement of the body politic. But in Ireland, taking heed of John McGaherns
quote, things are done differently here. This interregnum therefore between the
creation of the book, film, play has to be mediated by people like me. Allegory and
image and metaphor and language and sentences are the units of a writer, it is up to
people like me, the administrators, to advocate more publicly, more savagely, more
honestly with the state. BUT with the knowledge and support of artists.

I have to make it clear that when I speak of the responsibility of an artist to society I
am distinguishing between artist/prophet and artist/citizen. I do think that the
artist/citizen could become more vocal in influencing how Irish society might evolve
but artist/prophet has an altogether different responsibility and that it just to
themselves, their sentences and their brush strokes. If in doubt, the work comes
first.

In a world governed by the desire for total control, the writer must be the
caretaker of the possible says McGahern in the same essay - A Literature without
Qualities.

Something happened between 1916 and 2014 that Im finding difficult to explain or
understand, which you will forgive me, in sounding out here tonight. Before we had a
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state, a constitution, a parliament, a democracy, the centrality of the artist in Irish
civic and political life was evident loud and clear. Artists as well as writing their
own work contributed to the writing of the 1916 proclamation and provided a
creative and artistic movement and context for the rising as far back as 1897 when
WB Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn wrote the manifesto towards the
establishment of the Abbey Theatre. But once the state was founded, and the
technocrats took over, women, dissidents, artists became marginalised through
censorship, poverty and in the case of women, through the constitution of 1937. Im
speculating of course as Im not a historian.

An early radical manifestation of any National Cultural Policy came with the
establishment of the Arts Council in 1951 and at political level with Charles
Haugheys tax-break for artists in the late 1960s and the emergence of a stronger
more coherent Arts Council through various Arts Acts over the last 30 years or so.
But not since Michael D. Higgins making history as Irelands first Minister for
Culture, have we had a National Cultural Policy or vision or even an expression of
how we think and articulate the role of culture in our modern Irish democracy.

Almost since Easter Monday 1916 or perhaps indeed since the end of the Civil War to
be more precise the military and political dimension of our sought-for Republic
dismissed artists as marginal to any current ingredient of our Modern Republic.
Maybe the artists dismissed themselves, I dont know.

I think John McGahern knew this, he certainly hinted at it. In fact I think with
Moran in Amongst Women he described the moral vacuum, the emptiness, the
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vaceousness even, of the failed promise of the delivery of the Republic as set out in
the proclamation.

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

Many of the signatories of the proclamation were poor writers and intellectuals, a
more unlikely crowd to spark a nation to freedom would be hard to imagine; that
the serious revolution was brought about mostly by British Bungling does not
lessen their place

So as we are in the process of commemorating the decade of Centenaries, it offers us
all an opportunity to assess and discuss what might the role of the artist and the arts
in Irish society be.

Every other area in Irish life is under scrutiny, being reassessed, and publicly
debated Health, Justice, Education, Political Reform, Climate Change, Human
Rights, Housing; yet one of the key aspects of any citizens life, a core make-up of
citizenship their right to access the arts is only discussed in terms of financial
support how much do artists get paid? Or what are the value/benefits of
supporting the Arts in Ireland. Do we need our own tribunal?

AOSDNA

The discussion and debate around Aosdna seems like a lazy witch hunt and makes
no sense in this one obvious respect I have never come across a group of artists in
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one single room who ever agreed on anything regarding art or culture. Why should
they? It seems like too easy a target

That is why we dont always see them in the one room too often, except at events like
this.

To paraphrase McGahern s quote again a writer must refuse to represent any kind
of ideological interests.or political dogma even if it marginalises them. Why
should they be corralled into Aosdna to offer any of us or indeed any newspaper a
justification of what they do as artists? There is transparency, we know what they are
being paid and why and how. So that is not an issue.

I support Aosdna because it is about 2 things It offers a simple recognition by the
state as to what you are artist It offers a status, a title and an acknowledgement
that costs nothing. Where else does that happen? Not in the dole office, where that is
not an acceptable or recognisable definition.

The second thing it can offer for some members is a small alleviation from poverty
it can offer time to artists and payment in the form of a Cnuas to make art. We
talk a lot in this country about Research and Development but I think Aosdna can
be that a place, a forum for ideas, for innovation and for creativity yes, I think
that the structures should change, the voting of Members should change and actors
and so called interpretative artists should be included but I am proud that we have
Aosdna as part of our Civil Society..and we should add another 50 members!

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Some who are writing about Aosdna might think of themselves, possibly, as a
contemporary form of the Convention of Drum Ceat which they say was held in
Limavaddy around 570. Although some of its accounts are fictional, it makes for a
great story. McGahern couldnt resist it either in referring to it. By the way, I think
John wouldve been ambivalent about the role or status of the artist in society. I
think he underplayed it, whether out of insecurity, the dread of the cult of the artist
or some form of self-protection.

Anyway, here is an excerpt from a conversation from his short story Bank Holiday,
(which I think is a major work of art) Two characters are wooing each other, as
they look towards Howth where Maud Gonne waited at the station as Pallas
Athena you can feel the sexual excitement and foreplay through the whole story
and McGaherns own serious analysis of what an artist or in this case a poet is or
should be. The huge presence of Patrick Kavanagh looms large in the story Im
digressing a little here but listen to the savage retort offered by the poet to the
narrator, McDonough (McGahern?) in the story:

Youre a cute hoar, McDonagh. Youre a mediocrity. Its no wonder, you get on so
well in the world.

This might be a possible hint that McGahern does revere the courage of the artist in
all its insecurities over the mediocrity of McDonagh who was a senior civil servant
writing Ministerial speeches.

Anyway, a little earlier in the story the legend of this great meeting at Drum Ceat is
discussed between this beautiful woman and McDonough, the mediocre poet;
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They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in this
unfortunate country

Why unfortunate she said quietly.

They create no wealth. They are greedy and demanding. They hold themselves in
very high opinion. Ten Centuries ago there was a National Convocation, an attempt
to limit their power and numbers

Wasnt it called Drum something?

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

But dont you feel that they have a function beyond wealth? she pursued

What function?

That they sing the tired rowers to the hidden shore?

Not in the numbers we possess here, one singing down the other. But maybe Im
unkind. There are a few

Are there poets to be seen?

They cant be hidden.
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So this debate in the media about Aosdna has a skewed focus. The focus should be
on the challenge of centralising the artist and culture in Irish society. To have the
courage and tenacity to think of Culture as a real and meaningful component of Irish
Citizenship. We have no self-confidence to this in our own language. How can we
articulate the intrinsic value of art and culture in our communities? How and in
whose language, should we approach candidates in the Local or European Elections
and ask them to support culture in our communities.

We have been robbed of the one thing we used to have control over Language We
are now borrowing the language of economists, of tourism, of job creation, of
training, of community development to advocate or justify government support for
the arts. We have lost our self-confidence to express ourselves in our own terms
Arts for Arts sake and we have no conviction to impress this on policy makers and
politicians. More often than not we are embarrassed.

NATIONAL CULTURAL POLICY

I work a lot with the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) in trying to reconcile
this problem. A 2016 Republic of Culture manifesto has been published and we have
started an advocacy campaign around making the case for the centrality of cultural
participation and artistic engagement for all the people in Ireland.

The NCFA s overall aims is to be a voice for the arts in Ireland, communicating the
value of the arts and campaigning for continued and increased engagement with and
investment in the arts, to work with others to ensure Ireland values all those who
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work in the arts and crucially provide a supportive environment for artists. We
need to also work with others to enable the arts to make the fullest possible
contribution to Irish society and its future.

On that point I welcome publicly the Arts Councils current review of itself and how it
might do its work better in a tighter financial landscape. I also welcome the
appointment of Sheila Pratschke as Chairperson of the Arts Council. Clearly one of
the new directions the Arts Council has to take is to become much more vocal,
around the support for artists in Ireland. The NCFA campaign was founded because
there was no public advocacy being made that we could hear I think there is a
climate of fear among artists and arts organisations, with some notable exceptions,
about publicly challenging government or policy matters or indeed the Arts Council
itself when it comes to policy or funding The fear of poverty, is a mighty censor.

We can communicate brilliantly in private but the fear of criticising a Government, a
Minister and Arts Council can make it a mute and moot point. How can the public
understand our fears and ambitions if we just talk to ourselves? That doesnt
happen in other sectors of society Housing, Education, Social Justice, and Climate
Change.

I think the time is right now to call on the Government for us to have a national
debate about a Cultural Policy there is none

Michael Starrett is CEO of the Heritage Council and Chair of the CNCI this is what
he said last week

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We live in a democracy and those democracies are led best when politicians have
legislative and policy led frameworks within which to work. It is for that reason
that we now need a National Cultural Policy, one which would include engagement
with the Higher Education sector by necessity and one which will need courageous
and visionary political leadership to deliver.

We can of course all continue to work within a framework that has served us well
that set up by our current visionary president Michael D Higgins when as Minister
for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht he saw and grasped the opportunity which
the responsibility brought to his Ministry. But that was 20 years ago and for 15 of
those 20 years our Cultural Institutions rode on the back of his long term and
transformational vision. We now need, to build on it again for the next 20 years.


I call on the Government to review the arts in Ireland during the decade of
centenaries whereby all of us can have a stake in insisting that citizens have a right of
full and equal access to the arts, in the same as we do to Education Housing and
Water (although we can see the challenges there too). We need to establish a
Republic of Culture for 2016 How about a Drum Ceat Convocation for the 21
st

Century to be held in Easter Week 2016.

Incidentally, a mischeivous but perhaps incisive commentary which McGahern
regarding the Rising was about its timing:

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In addition to the openness of the Proclamation to all the people of Ireland, I
think that it was unlucky for the Rising that it took place around Easter. This
placed it in direct competition with the Churchs greatest festival.

COMMEMORATION-ANXIETY

I do suspect, in fact, I know, that there is a considerable anxiety emanating from
Government regarding the commemoration of the decade of centenaries and in
particular for Easter Rising of 1916. This Commemoration Anxiety has been going on
for a while, which I believe will end up in Commemoration paralysis!

This anxiety or paralysis means that historians are now publicly fighting/or in
disagreement over issues of protocols over Royal visits that should or should not
happen. We should be planning and announcing our celebrations for the Easter
Rising now. For instance how about convening a General Assembly of the United
Nations in Dublin in 2016?

As Director of the Abbey Theatre, we are already at planning and commissioning
stage regarding how we might mark the Easter Rising in a similar manner in which
we marked the Lockout of 1913. I was particularly proud of all 63 artists and activists
we invited to do the Noble Call after the production of THE RISEN PEOPLE from
Prisoners in Wheatfield Prison to Stephanie Meehan, to Panti herself.
Commemorations are a complicated process but we have to trust that there will be
dignity and partisanship sitting side-by-side in any event we do. Again a nod from
John McGahern is worth heeding here. McGahern said that the 1916 Rising was not
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considered of great importance in the country that he grew up in. And in a way it
was the promise unfulfilled that caused that and this is a recurring theme in
Amongst Women and indeed in his essays.

What should we celebrate? Or commemorate? If not to see how we have managed
ourselves in the intervening 100 years No wonder the government is anxious about
it but it is the truth that we need to assess? But of course that is not that simple
either. McGahern admired the writing of the historian J.C. Beckett and I will quote
from Johns essay on meeting him

I admired the histories of the late Professor J.C. Beckett, especially the
clarity of his writing, and when we met and I told him so, he was glad. As he
thanked me, he remarked, or course, theyre prejudiced with a very sly twinkle.
What this has always seemed to me to imply is that there is no such thing as a true
history. Each is a version of what has taken place, and everybody who writes is
coming from somewhere

And that is the point which all of us, including the commemoration committee
should take note of; dont worry; there is no right and proper line to take in
commemoration. The complicated and more diverse it is, the better. It is a little
less than two years from now and in terms of national planning we dont want the
problems of a short-lead-in period which dogged Limerick City of Culture or indeed
the Cork Capital of Culture.

We should also not be afraid of the role of culture in commemoration and artists will
support this and be critical in imaginative ways. Of course, one needs to look no
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further than Sean OCaseys The Plough and the Stars which is still the greatest
warning to us all of the promise unfulfilled in a new Republic. OCasey,
incidentally, felt the greatest and most dramatic impact on Irish history of the 20
th

century was the 1913 lockout and if you connect that to the withdrawal of the Labour
Party from the 1918 General Election how different Ireland might have been. It is
these What ifs? that are just as important and interesting to explore in
commemoration rather than over-controlling or deterministic stance on what we can
agree on what happened or mightve have happened.

Professor Richard Kearney has spoken recently about how artists, through their
artwork, deal with Trauma, such as the great Irish Famine or the Holocaust, for
instance. He probes the question of political memory and asks how might we
combine, the poetics of narrative with the ethics of responsibility in addressing two
major duties

1) to realise our debt to historical past and
2) To respect the rival claims of memory and forgetfulness.

Memory as McGahern writes about both in fiction and his essays is never neutral and
neither is history.

This is what, I might suggest, is causing the Government anxiety, - the conflict
between history and memory and the politics of today. Who owns commemorations?

And this is where artist and culture will play and enormous role in transcending the
apparent opposites of history and memory. Whatever about the challenges of
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commemoration 1916, the Irish Civil War will be much more complicated and
challenging for us and I believe that we can look to McGahern for inpsiration here
and to make these commerations as much about the local as the national.

President Michael D Higgins called on all of us to look at new ways of creating myths
as a way of gaining a new understanding of ourselves. As President Higgins said on
the Abbey stage this January at our own symposium on The Theatre of Memory
Commemoration involves a choice between events and historical actors,
motivations and consequences, and its purposes may be as allusive and complex as
the various original impulses to remember. In other words, only interpretations of
memory are collectively remembered and commemorated.

If ever there was an ailment to relieve the Governments commemoration- anxiety
this is it It will be achieved through art, literature, theatre where we in Ireland as
President Higgins says laid bare the full creative potential of myth making in both
sense of memory and imagination

I will leave McGahern with the final words and perhaps a warning too, with less than
2 years to go to the celebration of the centenary of Easter Rising.

I think that we can best honour 1916 by restoring those rights and freedoms
that were whittled away from the National as a whole in favour of the dominant
religion. We should put the spirit of the Proclamation into our laws. What we care
likely to get, though, are more of the outward shows maybe even a grant or two -
while Wink goes out in search of Nod. (From a Glorious Dream to Wink to a Nod)