Arts Council Grant and the development of the arts in Athy

The Art Council’s announcement of a grant of €450,000 over a period of three years to help the development of creative opportunities for people of all ages in Athy was welcome news for the South Kildare town community. Athy’s rich music culture and its development over the years is a recognisable part of community arts which owes it’s success to community and individual initiatives. Equally important as one looks back over the years was the part drama played in the social and cultural life of the local people. In it’s current development plan Kildare County Council commits to facilitating the delivery of social, community and cultural infrastructure to meet the needs of the people of Athy. The Council identified the local Heritage Centre, now the Shackleton Museum and the Arts Centre in Woodstock Street as two important components in developing the arts in Athy, both of which occupy important places in the cultural life of the town. Both centres were born of local initiatives and have continued to develop, largely due to continuing community wide involvement and support. The following is part of a submission made on behalf of the local Arts Centre in support of the grant application to the Arts Council. ‘Athy Arts Centre was developed as a necessary part of the emerging cultural infrastructure for the town. The townspeople’s involvement in the arts was in the 1940s and later channelled through participation in local dramatic groups, either as performers or as members of audiences attending plays and musical shows in the Town Hall and St. John’s Hall. St. John’s Hall is no more, while the Town Hall is given over exclusively to the Heritage Centre/Shackleton Museum. The opening of the Arts Centre in Woodstock Street twelve years ago was seen as an essential requirement to meet the needs of the local community for a cultural facility in the town. Since then the Arts Centre has hosted exhibitions, plays and musical performances with local and visiting artists. In addition, the Arts Centre has been recognised as a useful facility for emerging artists/bands in which to practice and rehearse. It has become an important element of the town’s cultural stream, joining the library and the museum in a triumvirate of cultural facilities readily accessible to the general public.’ Over 35 years ago UNESCO commissioned a study of cultural policy in Ireland and the subsequent report noted the narrow ‘arts’ definition of culture and the task facing cultural policy makers of recognising that culture is a dynamic force to be developed in and by all the people through education as well as cultural development at community level. In other words, art must identify with community involvement in music of all types, drama, dance, literature and not just the visual arts. The training and nurturing of creative and performing artists must be seen as an important part of the recently announced grant, but hopefully some amount of funding will be made available for arts related physical infrastructure, without which the development of arts and the cultural needs of the community may not be satisfied. Community arts requires local initiatives supported as needs be by state agencies and this grant provides a very real opportunity for Athy to further extend access to the arts, especially through educational programmes. The hope is that the Creative Place Grant Scheme will make a major contribution to the cultural life of Athy over the next three years and for many years into the future. The Irish Humanities Alliance, as part of the consultation on National Cultural Policy initiated by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, made a written submission in 2015 to the ‘Culture 2025’ discussion document. Pointing out that Ireland’s international reputation is predicated on its cultural achievements in literature, drama, poetry, music and the arts in general it suggested local authorities such as Kildare County Council have a ‘distinctive role in fostering the cultural life of communities’. The creative funding grant awarded by the Arts Council which is to be administered by Kildare County Council is acknowledgement of the local authority’s key role in assisting and nurturing local initiatives in relation to cultural activities. Development of the arts must come from community-based initiatives involving local people and should not be seen as something imposed from the top, whether from government agencies or local authorities. Far too much centralisation has weakened local communities, but this Creative Place funding gives a real opportunity to the local community in Athy to develop cultural education and training programmes designed to increase local involvement in the arts and cultural activities in general.