The Stage

Irish performers shut out at Wexford, say Musician’s Union

Published Monday 18 October 2004 at 16:30 by Anthony Garvey

The Musicians’ Union of Ireland has accused Wexford Festival Opera, which opened this week at the city’s Theatre Royal, of deliberating excluding Irish musicians and using “cheap labour” from Eastern Europe instead.

Union secretary John Swift issued a public appeal to Arts Minister John O’Donoghue, as well as to civic authorities in Wexford, to rectify the situation for future festivals. “As a headline event in Ireland’s artistic year”, he said, “the Wexford Festival should showcase Ireland’s musicians and at the same time provide them with significant employment.”

For the past three years the festival has engaged the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus. It replaced the Irish-based RTE National Symphony Orchestra, which had worked with the festival for decades. The orchestra currently employed is the Cracow Philarmonic from Poland, which has been hired on a three-year contract.

“The issue is essentially one of cheap labour,” according to Swift, who said he feared the Cracow orchestra “has been engaged on terms and conditions significantly below EU standards”. The festival, he added, was reported to generate 15m euros annually for the local economy. “Sufficient funding should be available to engage Irish-based musicians on terms and conditions in line with EU norms.”

But the cheap labour charge was dismissed by Jerome Hynes, the festival’s chief executive. The Cracow orchestra, he said, was “working under entirely

acceptable conditions. We’re happy with the terms and they’re happy with them.”

Festival chairman Paul Hennessy, responding to the union criticism, claimed the terms demanded for use of the RTE National Symphony Orchestra were prohibitive. It would have been “grossly irresponsible” to agree the terms, he said, as they could have put the festival’s future in doubt.

However, a spokesperson for RTE said it had never sought to recover the staff costs incurred in providing the orchestra for the festival. The costs at issue, she insisted, were travel, subsistence and the other expenses involved in 18 days of performances and rehearsals.

Concern about the lack of local involvement in the artistic side of the festival has also been expressed by the Irish Arts Council. In providing the festival with a 800,000 euros grant for the current year, the council noted its “failure to nurture Irish opera artists and practitioners” and called for a vigorous reponse on the issue.