The Stage

Northern Ireland Assembly plans ‘devastating’ £1.3m arts cut

Published Tuesday 6 November 2007 at 14:55 by Michael Quinn

Northern Ireland’s cultural industry has been left reeling by the announcement of further cuts in its funding, which arts council chairman Rosemary Kelly has said is “tantamount to sounding a death knell over large areas of arts activity” in the region.

The shock decision to reduce spending on the arts by £1.3 million over three years from 2008 was revealed in the first draft budget devised by the newly established Northern Ireland Assembly. The decision has been met with disbelief by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland - which estimates the inflation-adjusted impact of the cut will be closer to £3 million - and shocked theatre workers into silence.

None of the three largest theatre companies approached by The Stage - the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and touring companies Tinderbox and Prime Cut - were available for comment on the issue, despite the implications should the budget be approved.

The proposed cut follows three successive years of standstill budget allocations that have reduced the per capita spend on the arts in Northern Ireland to the lowest of all the national regions in the UK and to just a third of that in the Republic of Ireland.

In January, ACNI had called for an increase of £26 million to establish arts funding parity with the rest of the UK, a demand that was met two months later with the loss of a further £4.5 million to pay for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

The latest reduction, by finance minister Peter Robinson, followed a recent debate in the assembly that applauded the contribution of the arts to Northern Ireland and passed a motion calling for per capita funding to be increased from the current level of £6.13 to £11.55.

The decision, added Rosemary Kelly, “will have devastating consequences for the arts sector and a negative impact on the economy as a whole. At the same time as arts in England have received a 12% increase, this budget proposal pushes the sector here into continuing downward spiralling decay”.

More than 35,000 people work in Northern Ireland’s arts sector and generate an estimated £30 million for the local economy.