Ireland, which was still a relatively poor country in the 1970s, has one feature that is both an advantage and a disadvantage: its people speak English well, and the vast majority of them use English as their native language. Gaelic-speaking areas are now fragile, and even heavy-handed efforts to push Irish into schools have not helped much. The number of native speakers of Gaelic has decreased significantly during the Republic of Ireland, and the average Irishman speaks English from morning to night.
Irish-speaking areas in present-day Ireland. Angr at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wichiped to Commons., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
This nationwide ability to speak English is advantageous from an economic point of view, as it essentially guarantees the Irish an easy involvement in global business. For software companies like Microsoft, Dublin was a natural place to set up their European offices and recruit thousands of employees.
But at the same time, it is also a disadvantage in the sense that any stupidity invented somewhere on the Berkeley campus will immediately arrive there with full force, and one might even say that with double force. As a relatively small nation within the Anglosphere, the Irish have a certain “mindrák” (not unlike our “little Čecháček”), which they sometimes compensate for by being more progressive than California itself.
One of the consequences of such eager efforts to be first is the fact that Ireland now permanently supports two thousand “State Artists”.
__________________________________________________________________________________
As usual, it was originally a temporary post-covid program, but try giving away free money only “temporarily”! Under pressure from the artistic community, the program became permanent this fall. There were almost ten thousand applicants, but so far there is only money for two thousand of them. So it was decided by lot.
It is not surprising that on the website CzechDesign.cz, in an article describing the Czech “status of the artist”, they speak of Ireland in an envious tone and quite uncritically repeat the sentence that “according to the (Irish) Ministry of Culture, every euro invested in the support of artists is returned to society in the amount of 1.39 euros”.
This is, of course, a typical finger print value; if the program was truly profitable, there would be no need to limit it to two thousand people. Of course, this is a pseudo-calculation that even the Soviet Union would not be ashamed of.
If you actually look at the document in question (PDF), you’ll find that the authors took the “hard money” (those that actually went out) on the one hand, and balanced it out by asking the artists if their lives improved (and surprisingly they did!) or if they had more interaction with the public about the art (of course they did!), to which phenomena they then assigned some entirely fictitious monetary valuation. The world is surprised, their sum was greater, so the program is said to be advantageous for Ireland.
What to say about that?
It is not without interest that a similar program once worked in the Netherlands, but it was canceled in the 1980s after the state warehouses were filled with a total of a quarter of a million pieces of various artistic creations, which then had nowhere to put them, although various authorities and schools received them as decorations on loan for free.
I honestly wonder how the Irish one will end. But I have to admit that even though I noted the Irish discussion about whether to change the program from temporary to permanent back in September, I was afraid to write about it at all – and that’s mainly because, God forbid, someone in our country doesn’t get inspired at the last minute before the elections. Even the current “artist status” is a pretty crazy invention.
Discussion forum for the article can be found here.
Musical epilogue
__________________________________________________________________________________________
The new part of ZP8 has twelve chapters, again selected from different corners of history. Not all are fateful events, so many forgotten fateful events are unfortunately not “at hand”. But I believe that you will not be bored with any chapter.
The book is available here, j
You can buy the whole set here.
