So six days ago I contacted the EU (a vast bureaucracy which cares about no-one and nothing according to many) and got a reply in minutes. On the same day, as a follow up, I contacted the Irish Arts Council, as suggested by the EU, for assistance. I'm still waiting t hear back from them.
Could it be that I am interested in literary pursuits? I only know directly of two groups in Ireland who received funding from the Arts Council last year for writing-related activities. The Irish Writers Centre in Dublin and the Western Writers Centre in Galway. And guess what? Both of them had their entire funding withdrawn this year. I know the biggest Irish book publishers get support and a literary magazine called the Stinging Fly, and they probably still get the money. But the fact is that without that money both of these endeavours would cease.
Which is one reason that Albedo One has decided that we will never accept Arts Council funding. Once you've had it you cannot survive without it. So we'll soldier on without their money.
But all I'm looking for is some adivce on how to obtain EU funding for a trans-national project - we still do't want Irsh money and they still couldn't give a monkeys about giving us a hand.
And you know, Irish tax-payers (that includes all of the Albedo One team) are paying the wages of these fine upstanding un-fireable civil servants. I don't know what it's like where you live but in Ireland civil servants can only be fired directly by the Government Minister in whose department they work. Maybe if they were answerable to the public OR EVEN THEIR MANAGERS for performance, they might be a little keener to be seen in pursuit of their functions. God forbid the public should see them as anything other than a joke. In the sixites (I think) Milo O'Shea played a civil servant in a TV series called Tales of the Lazy Acre. How come the ineptitude and laziness of our civil servants is still a ***king joke decades later. At least back then we were a third world country. How come such an important sector of our society still has a third world outlook?
By the way, the title of the piece relates to the score that the Arts Council would receive if they were competing in a Eurovision style contest where the audience phoned in their votes.
The Arts Council (Ireland)
Helping starving artists?
Maintaining the status quo.
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Alas, The Arts Council in Merrion Square, Dublin, have no time for the literary arts (chiefly because they don't make money) and otherwise have their favourites. I don't think anyone actually reads at the Council. They do a lot of Orwellian typing and they will make decisions based on anonymously-sent mails. But I do think they need to read more. When, at a meeting with them after Christmas last to discuss why it was they had wrecked the Western Writers' Centre and yet up-funded The Stinging Fly the official in front of me got very angry indeed and even distraught! Had I stood on something nasty? Clearly one isn't supposed to ask certain questions. I suspect they withdrew our funding because they were told to, probably by someone who felt miffed that we existed at all. I think the work of Albedo1 would be quite foreign to them. It's too imaginative, too experimental, too . . . .well, they wouldn't be aware, you see, that there is an alternative fiction tradition in Irish literature, you'd have to explain all of that to them and they might yawn a lot. They don't do information. Kissing cheeks French-style and calling people 'Dahling' is more their style up there: perhaps there's a story in all of that? Ironic that they have, or had, a portrait of Sheridan Le Fanu in their lobby. Probably most of them thought he was a film director. What can one add?
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