Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, there was such a thing as the Northern Irish patron cum benefactor cum art collector. If it wasn’t for the Troubles, we would have clear visual evidence of this, as Belfast used to be the second richest city in relation to Art Nouveau buildings in the UK. Less than half a century earlier, Belfast collectors were buying Pre-Raphaelite paintings, not to mention quantities of Dutch and Flemish 17th-to-19th-century art. And there we come to one of the rubs of the problem. By and large, Northern collectors don’t buy Northern Irish art. One of them has amassed a large collection of Clement Freud; Mr Barney Eastwood has a magnificent collection of Impressionists; others fly off to London for the Old Master sales. I don’t mean that there are no Northern Irish collectors of Northern Irish art (Lord Belmore is one) but rather that, compared to the South, we have very few. In fact, I know of Northerners who, upon the odd occasion when they do buy Northern artists, travel to Dublin to do so! Why is the art scene, generally, so depressing in Northern Ireland?

On one level, we don’t have far to look. To put it bluntly, the tradition in the North is of the hard-headed businessman who looks after his pennies, and expects the Good Lord (for which read the good government) to cut him a deal. In the South, the Good Lord has cut him an excellent deal, in the shape of the tax relief for donations of Heritage Items, in Section 1003 of the Taxes Consolidation Act, 1997. To give you an example, one particular businessman who had bought the McClelland Collection of, primarily, Northern Irish art, donated a good part of it to Irish Museum of Modern Art, and pocketed a 3 million euro tax credit in the process.

As an indication that the government in the Republic is serious about art, and more to the point, realises its value to the exchequer in terms of tourism, as well as its value to its own citizens, it instigated the Heritage Fund, which allows museums to acquire expensive single items for their collections in return for tax credits. There is also the Per Cent for Art Scheme which has proved such a boon, especially for sculptors and, of course, there is the tax-free existence for the artists themselves. Such schemes do not operate in the North. After all, we are but an appendix to England, have no government of our own, and have been landed with a motley crew of politicians who are more interested in in-fighting, sectarianism, and territoriality, than they are in art. As a result, there is little infrastructure in Northern Ireland designed and empowered, to foster the arts in our society.

Let us put this in context. Over the past thirty years or so, cities of a comparable size to Belfast such as Glasgow, Manchester, or Liverpool, not to mention smaller ones like Gateshead (Fig 5) or even Walsall, have used a combination of active political clout at city council level, government support, and local patronage, to forge an identity and create a positive image for themselves. How many people knew anything about Gateshead before the new bridge was built, or before the Baltic opened? Now there are regular daily flights to what was once a backwater. How many people knew about Walsall (Fig 1), other than in terms of post-Industrial depression, until the city decided to commission a huge and spectacular piece of public art from the Oldenburgs and spend £21 million on a new art gallery designed by Caruso St John?

Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester are notable for, at city council level, invigorating the arts in their respective cities over the past thirty years. New museums and art galleries, ambitious programmes of public art, festivals, spectacular exhibitions, all crowd the calendar on a regular basis. What do we get in the North? We get Belfast City Council taking a small art magazine to court and demanding that they issue an apology, because they produced issues on God and the Devil! We also got Belfast City Council deciding to run for the European City of Culture, but casually omitting to consult almost all of the arts community. Instead they packed their committees with businessmen in search of a fast buck and a debacle was the result.
There are occasional rays of hope, such as the building of the Millenium Centre in Portadown or the activities of Derry City Council. However, the Orchard Gallery has closed, the Public Art possibilities initiated by the TSWA Four Cities Project many years ago have largely disappeared. Many of the artists I know have either physically migrated to the South – Dermot Seymour, Diarmuid Delargy and Micky Donnelly immediately come to mind, not to mention the scores of Northern Irish artists whose primary market is in the Republic.


In Belfast, in relation to public sculpture, we do have the Laganside Corporation, noted for their infliction of a remarkable range of very obviously under-funded sculpture creations along the waterfront. They have notably poor relationships with local artists and artists’ groups and cynics consider that their dalliance with ‘art’ has more to do with profitable cachet than anything else.

The amount of public funds available for the purchase of art in Northern Ireland is pitiable. We do have the Arts Council which, post 1994, has really got its act together but its annual acquisition budget is a paltry £50,000. Funding for the Ulster Museum/Art Gallery appears to be even worse as the failure to acquire the portrait of James Emerson Tennent last year demonstrated (Fig 4). Tennent was one of the most distinguished citizens of Belfast in the first half of the 19th century; author, expert on natural history, an MP for twenty years, friend of Charles Dickens and life-long supporter of Greek independence. His portrait came up for auction at Slane Castle in the dispersal of the Langham Estate in September 2004. It was sold for only €36,000 to a buyer from Greece. The Ulster Musem said they could not afford to buy it. The Department of Finance and Personell (DFP) has been buying contemporary art since the 1960s. It budget this year was £30,000

In the Republic, the government is a regular buyer of art through a whole variety of agencies. The Arts Council there has already established a large collection of work of Irish artists. The Office of Public Works is another regular buyer of art for display in public buildings and embassies abroad. And, of course, the National Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane are constantly adding to their collections.

Now that we have a functioning Arts Council, it is time to give them proper finances and let them get on with the job. One obvious governmental intervention, apart from increasing grants in relation to the arts, would be to require all local councils, and in particular city councils, to allocate regular funds for the purchase of art. We need to insure that at least some of the monies, including those being distributed through Lottery grants, go to artists, and not to paramilitaries or other shady community groups (one group got money for building Twelfth of July bonfires ….), and so it goes.

We need local councils to be visionary, as opposed to considering the arts to be a waste of time and money. Northern Ireland is full of incompetent counsellors and politicos whose knowledge of the arts is zero, but who are convinced that they have a right to short-change the rest of us. Why is there no ‘stand-alone’ major art gallery in Belfast, apart from the Ormeau Baths Gallery (Figs 6 & 7) which itself, it is rumoured, is likely to close? How can Edinburgh Festival put on world-class exhibitions at festival time whereas Belfast Festival just piggybacks on local shows? How can University College Cork have the Glucksman, a purpose-built, state-of-the-art, gallery, while Queens University makes do with a corridor called the Naughton, and the University of Ulster makes do with no gallery at all? Can you imagine either the National Gallery or the National Museum in Dublin closing down for two years because of major problems with leaking roofs? Well, that is what is about to happen to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

To look at the educational problem from a different perspective, within the past five years or so, apart from a wide range of post-graduate programmes in the study of art, in the Republic, there have been three major developments in Dublin alone: The Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College; The National Visual Arts Archive at NCAD; and The National Centre for Irish Art at the National Gallery. By contrast, all the North can offer is the Interface programme at the University of Ulster, which has funding for only four years and is not premised on Northern Irish art.

It is a sad and depressing state of affairs that the arts in the North, in comparison either to the Republic, or to most of Great Britain, are substantially under-funded. There is no political drive at any level of the process and in the current and continuing political uncertainty, the liklihood of anything positive happening is zilch. Belfast is an arts backwater. The entire North is an arts backwater. The problem is not that we have a shortage of artists in any medium, but that so many artists leave the place because it’s stultifying. When we do get lively artist groups such as Catalyst, or Factotum, the latter a group who publish the magazine The Vacuum, the invariable response is a threat to freedom of expression (Fig 3).

We need legislation which will ensure that the outmoded attitudes of incompetent counsellors will no longer hold sway. And we need Government to be proactive; to ‘seed’ an infrastructure which will allow a combination of the Arts Council and professional artists in all media, to develop visionary ideas – which are not at the beck and call of local politicos – and which will create a positive and enduring image for the North. But most of all we need the arts community to make its voice felt. Its time they took to the barricades for a change.

Brian McAvera is an art critic and curator..