Cuts shock for Northern Ireland

 Arts Council Northern Ireland (ACNI) says “it will be difficult to maintain even standstill funding” after the shock announcement of a £1.1m cut in Northern Ireland’s 2010/11 arts budget. It follows the announcement of a £367m cut across all government departments in April 2010. ACNI was expecting an increase of £1.55m, based on previous budget projections. The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) will lose £25.9m. It is second-worst hit of all the Northern Ireland departments. ACNI Chair Rosemary Kelly said, “We are of course disappointed at the prospect of this cut… and very aware of the painful consequences that this will inevitably have for our artists, arts organisations and venues.” Acknowledging the political consensus on the budget, she added that “we must all prepare for difficult times ahead”.

 ACNI has also expressed alarm and disappointment with aspects of the recent report on arts funding from the Committee for Culture, Arts and Leisure (CAL), a cross-party committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The report called for more funding for voluntary and community-based arts and greater equality in arts provision, and recommended that ACNI require its funded organisations to increase their education and outreach work (AP208). This appears to infringe the arm’s length principle by making direct recommendations for actions by funded organisations. In its published response, ACNI regretted a “missed opportunity to advocate for the needs of the arts sector”, and upbraided the Committee for “the number of inaccuracies” in the report. ACNI points to the extensive outreach and community work done by funded organisations including the Ulster Orchestra, the Lyric Theatre and the Grand Opera House. David Byers, Chief Executive of the Ulster Orchestra, commended ACNI’s response, citing the orchestra’s award-winning outreach programme which reached 31,000 young people last year. “There was no recognition in the CAL report of that sort of work,” he told AP. He said that politicians’ concentration on community and voluntary arts “is more about looking for votes from their own electorate than what is happening in the arts”.
ACNI was also concerned that “a significant number of the [Committee’s] recommendations carry a further resource implication” which is now unlikely to be met. Nick Livingston, ACNI’s Director of Strategic Development, told AP that “the most alarming aspect [of the report] is that there is no recommendation to either maintain or increase funding for the arts,” and said that recent achievements of the arts sector had not been taken into account. ACNI claims that its goal to achieve parity of arts spending with the rest of the UK and Ireland has been “undermined by the Committee’s decision to contest the veracity of the comparative spending figures supplied by each of the Arts Councils”. The Committee argued that “there is no universally accepted indicator” of per capita spend, and that it should be calculated to include all government and local government arts spending. ACNI responded that per capita spend has never included either capital spending, or funding from departments other than DCAL. A six-week consultation is underway on the provisional arts budget.