You may recall that during the Recent Terror, when the ship was holed below the waterline and rats baled out for warmer, less inquisitive climes, a few foolhardies (the Hog included) looked beyond the end of days and called forth a vision to prevail after the dust had settled, for a new set of values and a debate about where we wanted to go after the Terror passed…

Well, what do you know? In parallel with the end of the longest and coldest winter in half a century, we can sense the first signs of a change in our public discourse.
In essence, ever since the debacle emerged, the public debate’s most strident voices have been those of economists, accusers and apologists. The discussion has raged around responsibility and who would carry the can…
That debate was driven by economists, politicians and commentators (aka the new episcopacy) so it’s no surprise that it was all about vengeance, survival and recovery.
Politicians and commentators are fixated on the next headline, but we expect economists to have a view that’s both longer and wider. Sadly, the Terror lured them to the stage front once again, back from their ivory towers.
Well, economists embody Wilde’s description of a cynic, he who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. So, our debates for the last eighteen months have been about the money, the banks, the irresponsibility, the guilt and when people spoke of recovery they had in mind the States’ finances, job creation.
Through it all the dominant view was, and in political and economic circles remains, a belief that we need to and intend to get back to where we were.
But slowly, even as the rage intensified, another noise began to break through. At first it was but a murmur, a quiet voice offstage, a tune heard fleetingly. But recently it has broken through and jaysus, everyone’s not just tweeting, they’re humming it…
Let’s call it the arts and culture thread.
Over the past few weeks people have begun to probe an agenda that stretches far beyond the economic and the immediate. It embraces key themes like identity, so it became a major topic during St. Patrick Week. But it is also beginning to address more prosaic and yet utterly vital issues like how we want to conduct our business, how we want to run our services, how we want to exist as a society.
Nobody has yet, as far as I can see, mentioned the great American psychotherapist and educator William Glasser, but the spirit of his Choice Theory is alive and well. One of its most basic tenets is well known from Roy Keane – if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. If you want something different you have to choose to change.
But tellingly, for all that this thread is working the arts and culture theme, it’s also hard-headed and businesslike.
Indeed, it’s deliciously ironic that the moment of revelation, the moment where the alternative to the gloomy brutality of the economic analysis began to break through the surface, came in the middle of the forum in Farmleigh…
Remember, this was where the successful diaspora was invited to give their tuppence worth on how we could begin to rebuild Humpty Dumpty. There was much excitement among the bootboys (of the media in particular) that they’d give the Government a good shoeing and would prescribe hard labour and salt tack for the labouring classes and public service alike.
But the big message that emerged had shag-all to do with that. Instead, those present fastened on to the things that make Ireland unique, the reasons why people might want to visit and/or do business here and they pointed in no uncertain terms to the creative industries, to arts and culture.
Those who celebrated the casual dismissal of these areas in the McCarthy report were astonished, and all the more so because those at Farmleigh were all successful and wealthy people, on the face of it doers not talkers, the kind of people who, in the deluded ravings of the economic bootboys, should only be interested in arts and culture as investments.
They might indeed, but they saw something else too and linked an intense focus on education (and particularly maths, science and engineering) with a complementary emphasis on creativity and on blending a culture of curiosity, inventiveness and design with one of enterprise.
Well, all of a sudden the Big New Idea has traction. Official Ireland (the Irish Times and Morning Ireland) have been running features on building the new republic. The chattering classes have moved on.
One hopes we’ll get beyond what’s been said to date, a predictable chorus of shoulds and needs and let’s all get together… We could do with moving beyond the sounds of the alternative great and good.
The fact is, not everybody is worth hearing – often (and this is certainly true in the arts) those with the most interesting things to say find it hardest to be heard above the racket made by the headliners.
It’s time to punk up the debate. By this I mean matching grassroots business savvy to the technology and communications avenues at which our creatives are already expert.
As for the State, well, the appointment of Gabriel Byrne as Cultural Ambassador, inspired by the Minister for the Arts Martin Cullen, is a good start start. To follow, there are two simple things that could easily be done to advance this new dispensation: first, extend the artists’ tax exemption to design, inventions, patents, and (especially) music production and video games; and second, change corporation and capital gains tax to zero for the first five years of exploitation of any invention benefiting from the inventors’ exemption. Then, watch the creative sparks fly…