One of the better Bond villains (I think it was Goldfinger) made the observation that when strange things start to occur, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence - but three times is enemy action.”
Fred Johnston, the 55-year-old manager of the Western Writers’ Centre on Galway’s Nuns’ Island, has little doubt that the latter option is what’s behind the Arts Council’s bizarre refusal to grant any funding to the WWC – not just one, two or even three times, but actually eight (and seven of those, plus appeals, in a row!).
At this stage, the weary Johnston is wondering if this is a record.
“We got shot down seven times in a row, which is pretty unique,” he says. “And then they recently gave us €800 for a computer – which is brilliant when you can’t pay the rent! And then they refused us funding again just after Christmas.”
Founded by Johnston four and a half years ago, the Western Writers’ Centre is the only writers’ resource of its kind west of the Shannon.
Employing four staff through a work-scheme, the WWC has initiated, amongst other things, a variety of writers’ courses, a publishing seminar, a writers’ residency at Merlin Park Hospital, two modest winter poetry festivals, and a hugely popular ‘Poetry on the Buses’ scheme (in association with Bus Eireann).
All of this literary activity has been achieved on a shoe-string budget. “We’re scraping by at this stage,” says Johnston. “We get funding on an event-by-event basis from the likes of Poetry Ireland.
"But it’s very difficult. We’ve applied for funding again from the Arts Council, and we’ve got as much information as we possibly can from the Freedom of Information Act on why we’ve been refused past grants.
“It would seem from the few documents we have managed to see that there’s contradictory things going on in there. One assessor said that our bi-lingual events had 50% more Irish than other similar events, but we still didn’t get funding that year. It’s kind of a Catch-22. They criticise you for not programming enough stuff – yet they know that you’ve no money.”
Belfast-born, Johnston has lived in the City of the Tribes since 1976. A well-respected poet, musician, novelist and critic, he has been involved in the city’s literary life for three decades now.
In 1986, he founded Cuirt, Galway’s first ever poetry festival. Although he no longer has any involvement, Cuirt has now grown to become a major international literary festival.
Johnston claims that he was shafted out of the festival – a by no means unlikely scenario in the notoriously bitchy and political world of the Galway arts scene. When he left the festival only a year after he’d founded it, the news made the front page of the local papers. He sees himself as a victim of his idea’s success. “I think the trouble with me initially started because the damn thing was successful,” he laughs. “As a friend of mine said, ‘If it had been a complete bummer, nobody would’ve remarked on it’.
"They would have said the usual thing – ‘fair play, you had a shot at it’. But the thing is that it was a huge success. I mean, the last evening of the first festival we had John Cooper Clarke and Paul Durcan on the one bill, and 500 people at it. The problems for me started from there.
“I could go into details forever, but basically someone had decided that my profile was too high around this one festival, and it was time for me to go. And there were a lot of devious means used to do that – including a series of ‘secret’ meetings where Minutes were never kept.
“But I don’t want to complicate things too much with ancient history. It was very nasty at the time, and none of the people involved are there now. But it was a very nasty experience, and the real damage that I’ve felt – although I’ve tried very hard to fight it – is that it has coloured my opinion of much of how the arts work in Galway. And I think that’s very unfortunate, because there’s some great things going on.”
Although founder of the Western Writers’ Centre, he is at pains to point out that he isn’t the embodiment of it. “I’m not the Writers’ Centre, I just started it off,” he says.
“There is a chairman and a secretary and another staff member. We’re a limited company. But when you become that directly associated with it, you also – by paradox – become the target of any criticism of it.”
Does he think that his own history of friction with the artistic powers-that-be could have something to do with the Council’s continual refusal of funding?
“Well, I think what happened is because I’ve been around so long in Galway, and previously on the scene in Dublin for years and years, is that you can protest too much,” he laughs.
“And then the old Irish village argument is brought in, and they transform you from being a genuine agitator into being a village idiot. Ah, it’s that mad fucker again!
“It’s always possible that you’ve got up one individual’s nose, and that that one individual is in there saying, ‘No – absolutely not!’ But I think any Irish artist could rabbit off 100 people who would probably do this. Ha, ha! But I don’t think it’s that, I think it’s more clear cut. I think it’s a strategy that the Arts Council have adopted in order to prop up a programme in an already subsidised piece of Arts Council strategy – which is the Galway Arts Centre. Which should arguably have had a writers’ centre years ago, but never did - either through lack of energy or lack of imagination.”
While the Galway Arts Centre are responsible for running the Cuirt festival, they have only initiated a separate literary programme relatively recently.
“The Galway Arts Centre do the Cuirt Festival, and they do it very well,” Johnston admits. “But if you’d asked me how much literary stuff they did two years ago, the answer would have been ‘very little’. But what has happened within a year of us starting up is there’s been a parallel refusal to give us grants from the Arts Council, and then there was the establishment suddenly of a very in-your-face literature programme in the Galway Arts Centre. It hadn’t been there before. There hadn’t been a literature officer since I was there in 1987. Suddenly they appointed a literature officer.”
This is not a coincidence. According to Johnston, it’s a very deliberate and calculated part of a controlling Council strategy.
“When the Writers’ Centre started off, some of us went up to the Arts Council to meet Mary Cloake – who wasn’t the director of the Arts Council then, but is now. We go up to see her and we’re having a meeting, and suddenly she assumed this expression on her face, which was like shock, and she came out with a statement which I think has dominated their philosophy since - ‘What do you want a Writers’ Centre for when you’ve already got an Arts Centre?’
“Now if you apply that to Dublin, why don’t you shut the Irish Writers’ Centre down because you’ve already got the Project Arts Centre? It doesn’t make any sense. So the case was argued that these were two different functions. Now bear in mind that the Arts Centre had no literary programme, as such, at that stage of the game. But very shortly afterwards they did! And now it’s getting bigger all the time. As it should do – they’re getting €340,000 from the Arts Council for 2006.”
Although local politicians like Eamon O’Cuiv, Frank Fahey and Michael D. Higgins (who proclaimed himself “mystified” at the refusal of grant aid), and writers like Ulick O’Connor, Macdara Woods and Bob Quinn, have publicly called for the Arts Council to reverse their decision, both the Council and Arts Minister John O’Donoghue apparently remain unmoved.
The centre recently collected a petition of over 400 signatures in just one afternoon in Galway, but this was also ignored.
At this stage, Johnston is beyond frustration. “One of the Arts Council’s literary assessors wrote in her report that the essential problem to our development was a conflict with the Galway Arts Centre. She wrote that the way to solve this was that the Board of the Arts Centre and the Board of the Writers’ Centre should come together, have a chat or whatever, and report back to the Arts Council. The Arts Council have been at pains to tell me that that is not what she meant. Now, I can bloody read! It’s exactly what she said!”
According to Johnston, the Galway Arts Centre appears to have no interest in sharing the city’s literary ball. Unsurprisingly, he’s calling foul.
“The Galway Arts Centre have completely refused to engage with us,” he fumes. “They won’t answer any letters or emails or communications. They don’t even acknowledge them. The only time that I’ve ever addressed the current director of the Arts Centre was when I verbally tackled him during the first Project ’06 meeting [a new group attempting to organise an alternative Galway Arts Festival - OT] – and I tackled him across the floor out of pure frustration. It was the wrong place to do it. But the Centre simply would not reply to our letters, would not acknowledge us.
“And there’s a general consensus with them – a mixture of arrogance and sheer bad manners. Who are these people that they don’t reply to letters? Who the fuck are they? And I can only imagine that they get that kind of arrogance because they’re getting this huge cash injection from the Arts Council. Certainly, in my view, they seem to have this view that ‘we are the only place where you can do individual arts in Galway’. It’s like the old song, ‘How do I know?/The bible told me’ - ‘How do I know?/The Arts Council told me’. And they’re sending a clear message to us because they’re not giving us any money; i.e. - we are ‘The Man’, and we don’t have to reply to you!”
The Western Writers’ Centre remains open, and is still programming literary courses, readings, workshops and events, but they’re now going to have to rely solely on their own fund-raising efforts to continue to exist.
“We’re going to have to start looking for public money now – or rather yesterday. The kind of money that we’re looking for to keep running for a year is really only lunch money. We’re talking about €20,000. In Arts Council terms, twenty grand is nothing – you can get an individual grant for that.”
Although, in the past, Johnston has personally received Arts Council support for his own literary endeavours, he doesn’t see this as a good reason why he shouldn’t protest against their mysterious refusals to aid the WWC. Not that he expects his protests to fall on anything but deaf ears.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to change this,” he sighs. “I don’t think that the Arts Council are ever going to fund us. And I think that’s a really bad show. And it speaks for a much wider thing.
“My own view is that the Council have no room in their philosophy for independent operations. There is an Orwellian feel to this sort of thing; controlling the Arts by herding them into centres where their development can be monitored, as it were, and funding regulated in terms of the kinds of art featured there. But is it in the gift of the Arts Council to behave like a Roman emperor putting out his thumb and saying, ‘You will live and you will die’? I don’t think it should be.”
When contacted by hotpress, Arts Council press officer Michelle Hoctor refused to comment. “As a matter of policy, we do not talk about any individual organisation’s specific applications for Arts Council funding,” she explained. “We have to respect client confidentiality.”