Who is popular today?

I meet Liv O’Donoghue outside the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar, where she is a member. O’Donoghue is an actor, dancer and choreographer and is on the steering group of the National Campaign for the Arts and we’re going to talk about how to improve Dublin’s relationship with art as we walk around the city centre.
“The Campaign for the Arts was established about 10 years ago now, when An Bord Snip had brought in massive cuts,” she says. “Our message has been the same all along, which is maintaining the Arts Council funding and increasing it, trying to get us to at least the average level in the EU . . .
“Leo Varadkar’s original election promise was to double the funding, which would have brought us close to the EU average. So we’ve been chasing that . . . Artists are earning less than minimum wage.” The European average in arts funding is 0.6 per cent of GDP whereas Ireland spends 0.1 per cent.

What would a city be without arts and culture?
 

We’re starting here because, as O’Donoghue says, Temple Bar is the perfect example of an area which was intended for arts and culture but which ultimately lost its way.
“Temple Bar is a perfect example of where things went wrong in the city. It became an area for tourists and not for its citizens. I spend a lot of time working at Project Arts Centre or going to the Temple Bar Gallery Studios but I leave immediately after. I have no interest in spending time in Temple Bar.”
Arts are central to how Ireland sells itself internationally but O’Donoghue thinks people would be very surprised to hear about the precarious lifestyles of most artists. “I’m a low-income earner. I’m trolleyed out across the world to drinks receptions at consulates, but at home we’re living in relative poverty. Over the last decade in particular, the city has just changed so dramatically. And what we’re finding is that it’s just not feasible to live here. And what would a city be without arts and culture?”
Because of the difficulties making a living, she says, a lot of people “age out” of the arts and the sector loses their experience. “We’re losing a huge amount of people who are mid-career because they hit their mid 30s and think: ‘I don’t want to live in a crap house-share with five other people and I want to think about how I get health insurance.’ And then you go: ‘Maybe this isn’t a viable career anymore.’ So we’re losing a huge amount of experience and knowledge and talent just because it’s just not viable for a lot of people.”
15-minute city
As we walk up Capel Street, O’Donoghue references Carlos Moreno’s concept of the 15-minute city. This is the notion that in a city everyone should be able to access to all the amenities they need within a 15-minute walk from their home. “Capel Street is a good example of that. It’s one of the few streets left in the city centre where you’re going to have your butchers and your cobblers. But I’d love the sense that there’d also be an artist within 15 minutes of everyone.”
Very close to Capel Street, the original location of the arts centre the Complex on Little Green Street is now a building site. O’Donoghue talks about how, in the last recession, artists brought life back to the city by adopting and caring for buildings that had been abandoned when the money disappeared. However, those artists were not supported to hold onto those properties when the economy recovered.
“We’ve just lost so many venues in the last three or four years,” she says, “places like the Joinery, Block T, the Hangar, the Tivoli. They’re all being turned into apartments and hotels. We’ve kind of sold [the city] to the developers. There is, I think, a little bit a neoliberal agenda fuelling the fire, the exponential growth of this city, that’s just pushing its own inhabitants out.”

The Complex itself has been relocated to another address in Arran Street with the assistance of the Arts Council. The new location features artists’ studios and a 350-seat theatre space but again its future is only secure for a limited amount of time. A little later we pass Smock Alley on the other side of the river, a theatre on a site that has hosted theatres since the 17th century. “That’s a good historical example of a theatre that fell into disuse, was turned into a church and is now a theatre again. So maybe that’s a lesson from the past.”
A general issue with arts funding in this country, says O’Donoghue, is its short-term timescale. “The Arts Council is an extraordinary resource and we’re really lucky to have it,” she says. “But if we compare ourselves to other European cities we don’t have multi annual funding in Ireland . . . In other countries artists can get two year, five year, 10 year bursaries . . . [here] it’s year by year.
“In the theatre and dance, in particular, we would do a lot of touring. And that requires having international partners and that kind of thing. [In other countries] they’re planning their events years in advance but because they’re on a different timeframe to us, we can never commit. So it’s really tricky. It leads to precarity because an artist can’t go: ‘Okay, well, I’m guaranteed to have this for the next three years so I can afford to move to slightly better accommodation or get a loan for the car that I need in order to do my work.’”
With this in mind, everyone involved with the National Campaign for the Arts is very pleased that Minister for Arts Catherine Martin and the Arts Recovery Task Force have decided launch a three-year trial of a universal basic income (UBI) of €325 a week for artists (with a view to rolling it out beyond the arts in time).
Stigma
“That’s something that we’ve been talking about for a number of years,” says O’Donoghue, “UBI would pay for our time and we could earn our money on our gigs, and everything else on top of that.” There would be less stigma to UBI, she thinks. “There wouldn’t be that sense of artists getting free money or scrounging on the dole.”
She would also like to see rent control. “For everyone, not just artists. There’s so much competition for semi-decent housing. If there’s a consultant with Accenture or an artist living on grants, which one is the landlord going to go with?

The biggest subsidisers of art in this country are artists
 

“And then you have a lot of visual artists who need to both rent somewhere to live and somewhere to work . . . I know lots of older actors or arts people in New York and the only reason they’re still going is because they have their little, shabby little apartment that they’ve had for 30 years [because of rent control] . . . We don’t actually need much. I don’t need to be rich. If someone said to me: ‘Liv you’re going to get 20 grand a year for the rest of your life.’” She laughs. “I would literally bite their hands off.”
We go back over the river and into Dublin Castle where we sit facing the Chester Beatty museum. “Venues and arts institutions take up a huge amount of the annual budgets,” she says. “And that does sort of trickle down to artists. But it trickles down in a way that doesn’t really help the precariousness.”
She stresses that these larger organisations are very important and that she wouldn’t like to see their funding cut. “But we have to be careful that we’re artist-led [with arts policy], so that the venues and the Arts Council don’t dictate the type of art that happens. It shouldn’t be top down . . . But it isn’t unusual to be at events where everyone is getting paid except the artist. The arts institutions, the venues, they serve a really crucial role [but] those big facades, they don’t suit everyone either. They can be very intimidating. And, I think, particularly for younger artists, or artists who come from different backgrounds, who didn’t necessarily go to NCAD [National College of Art and Design], who don’t necessarily have the credentials, it can actually be quite difficult to bypass the structures. So having smaller [arts] spaces would be really, really beneficial.”
It’s important for the city that artists live and work there, says O’Donoghue. “It’s part of the city’s identity. There is a very clear sense of pride in the arts that come out of Dublin: ‘This is us, this is who we are, this is what we’re making.’ And then for us to be able to bring that out into the world I think is really exciting.”
O’Donoghue thinks that after a year of lockdowns people appreciate the arts more than ever. “I think they realised what was at stake was all of the music and the books and TV and film that really kept people company . . . It’s not just about going to the national concert hall, or the Abbey Theatre. It’s in your everyday life.”
And the reality, she says, is the biggest subsidies going into the Irish art world comes from the artists themselves. “We give so much of our time for free. I only really get paid for the time that I’m in a studio or I’m on a stage or teaching. I don’t get paid for any of my research time or the time we spend making funding applications and all the time we spend managing our teams or trying to get our international partners. We don’t get paid for any of that. The biggest subsidisers of art in this country are artists.”
THREE WAYS TO HELP THE ARTS
Up the funding
Bring national arts funding in line with our European neighbours from 0.1 per cent to 0.6 per cent of GDP.
Rent control
The city is increasingly too expensive for the artists who document and enrich it. Rent controls would make the city more habitable for many people (not just working in the arts).
Multiannual arts funding
Unlike other European countries most of our arts funding is distributed on an annual basis. Having multi-year funding would allow artists and arts projects to plan ahead and have a more sustainable presence in the city.