The Irish Arts Council is struggling with the yearly budget arrangements; and well the mainstay of support for Writers has been cut out of the Budget. This small preoccupation has many (many) reasons for me; but I shall refer in brief to two:
1.In 2003 , the Then Minister for Arts and Tourism decided to commit a major error and introduce legislation (for the second time only in the history of the Irish State) that ties artistic funding quite closely to the organs and instruments of government. An extremely bad and idiotic idea; but we have been struggling with a Government for ten years that thinks Art is a business, thus removing the Arts portfolio from it’s natural place with Heritage/The Islands to a profit-creating sector.
2. The man who has been appointed to the Arts Portfolio has been directly responsible (also in 2003) for abolishing the Heritage Agency (Dúchas). So it all fits together with inevitable alacrity. We have no legislative provisions nor Statutory Implements for the preservation of our heritage. Thus Tara. The links to the ongoing Tara campaign, which discuss more fully this remiss are on the right side-bar.
Thats my protest registered. I am disgusted at how our state maintains both interference in our expression; and has no functional application in protections -go figure!
A Saturday Woman Poet
The Soul’s Expression by EBB
With Stammering lips and insufficent sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound,
and inly answering all the senses round
with octaves of a mysitc depth and height
which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
and utter all myself into the air.
But If I did it,- as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Love the usage of the words ‘inly’ and ‘outbear’; but then I adore the work of Ms Browning anyway
Chris Murray 