Open Journal Systems Trinity College Dublin
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‘Just about coping’: precarity and resilience among applied theatre and community arts workers in Northern Ireland
Get PDFThrough a focused study on the 2013 UK City of Culture programme in Derry / Londonderry, this paper explores the economic precarity of community-based artists, despite such programmes heavy reliance on such artists for proposed ‘success’.
In March 2015, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) cut grant funding to some arts organisations by 40-100%, in order to manage an 11% reduction from the Northern Ireland Executive (NIE) in its 2015/16 Budget (ACNI, 2015). This was despite a high-profile ‘13p for the arts’ ACNI campaign, which had lobbied the NIE to preserve existing levels of arts funding (estimated at 13p per capita per week), already significantly lower than in other parts of the UK (‘far less than the 32 pence per week spent in Wales’, Litvack, 2014, online). Alongside cuts to spending on Social Development, Health and Education, and a reduction in European Union Peace funding, these have reduced the financial support available to applied theatre and community arts practitioners in Northern Ireland, despite such initiatives as the 2013 UK City of Culture programme. In these increasingly precarious conditions, how can community-based artists survive
Exporting Art from Ireland: The Alfred Beit Foundation and the Protection of Cultural Property
Get PDFThis article examines the legislative framework in place in Ireland, before and after the events of the Beit sale in 2015. In April 2015, Christies of London announced the sale of several old Masters paintings owned by the Alfred Beit Foundation. There was an immediate hostile public reaction. This attempted sale highlighted weaknesses in the existing Irish art export regime. The sale was challenged in court by An Taisce – the National Trust for Ireland - and the court case began a judicial review of the licensing regime. This initiated a series of changes by the Irish government, e.g. extension of the criteria for the issuing of export licences to the European Union. This is a minor change that does not resolve the greater concerns relating to property rights vs. heritage protection. In addition, it exposed the absence of political will to prioritise and legislate for cultural heritage protection in Ireland, in particular, for non-archaeological artefacts. The purpose of this article is to acknowledge that changes were made to the system, and to highlight continuing weaknesses in the regime
Taxation, Debt and Relative Prices in the Long Run: The Irish Experience
Get PDFThis paper investigates the effects of public debt and distortionary labour taxation on the long-run behaviour of Irish relative non-traded goods prices. We highlight that higher public debt, acting through higher taxes, has an equivocal impact on the relative supply of non-traded goods and, correspondingly, relative prices. Our empirical analysis for Ireland suggests that taxes and public debt play significant roles in the long run, comoving negatively with the relative price of non-tradables. Accordingly, shifts in public debt and taxation bear implications for the country’s international price competitiveness
The Changing Nature of Irish Wage Inequality from Boom to Bust
Get PDFThe dramatic change in economic conditions in Ireland over the last ten years provides an opportunity to examine the impact of large macroeconomic shocks on inequality. We analyse wage inequality in Ireland, from the height of an economic boom, through a very deep recession, to the start of a recovery. In keeping with previous work we find that the dispersion in wages increased towards the height of the boom, driven largely by rising returns to skill. However the economic crisis of 2008-2013 was accompanied by a significant reduction in wage dispersion. Although the improving characteristics of the workforce increased wages for all workers over this period, this was offset by falling returns to these skills. Only workers in the lowest decile were unaffected by declining returns, resulting in a reduction in wage inequality during the recession. Our analysis highlights the important role played by the National Minimum Wage in this process
Introduction: 50 Years of Social Research at the ESRI
Get PDFIn 1966, the Economic Research Institute became the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). The then Minister for Education, George Colley, framed this decision ‘as a most important initial step in providing for our society a scientific knowledge of ourselves’. In the 50 years that followed, social research in the ESRI has led new thinking on critical social issues in Ireland, developing new ways of measuring poverty, deprivation and quality of life, establishing a model to assess the distributional impact of tax and welfare policies, and tracking the experiences and outcomes of young people as they move through the educational system. ESRI research has played a critical role in understanding the persistence of inequalities on the basis of social background and gender while highlighting the situation of groups often previously neglected in Irish social research, including children and adults with disabilities and Travellers. For most of this period, social research at the ESRI was underpinned by a dedicated survey unit, which used cutting-edge techniques in sampling and questionnaire design to provide a high quality evidence base to inform policy. Social research at the ESRI played an important role not only in the Irish policy arena but on the European stage, with ESRI researchers contributing to a number of large-scale European projects and the collection of data such as the European Social Survey and the European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions
Art practice, process, and new urbanism in Dublin: Art Tunnel Smithfield and social practice placemaking in the Irish capital
Get PDFThis paper presents research with Art Tunnel Smithfield (ATS), Dublin, positioning it in Dublin-wide placemaking practices, and situating it within the city’s tracts of vacant land and Dublin’s bespoke new urbanism. It focuses on the project as a form of social arts practice, giving examples of arts activities and agencies in the space, and locating the work within placemaking typology as ‘social practice placemaking’ (SPPM). SPPM is conceptualised as an extension of participatory public/new genre public art (Lacy, 2008) to a ‘new situationism’ (Doherty, 2004). This perspective views the co-production of art as constructive of new spatial configurations and emergent relations between users and space. Locating this work in the socio-politics of urban life, SPPM has to be understood as an art form that dematerializes the built object and is concerned with creative and social processes and outcomes
A view from the bridge: institutional perspectives on the use of a national internship scheme (JobBridge) in Ireland’s National Cultural Institutions
Get PDFIreland’s National Internship Scheme, also known as JobBridge, was in place between 2011 and 2016, and in excess of 40,000 internships were commenced during that period across the private, public and voluntary sectors. This study examines the use of JobBridge and other internship schemes in five of Ireland’s National Cultural Institutions during a time of high unemployment and an extended recruitment moratorium in the public sector. The findings were based on a series of interviews with arts managers within host organisations to broaden the field of research on the use of internships in the arts and cultural sector by focussing on institutional perspectives. The paper concludes that JobBridge had many short-term benefits for the National Cultural Institutions consulted, but that the scheme was a short-term solution to a much greater staffing crisis in the public and cultural sector, as evident by the highly qualified and experienced jobseekers knowingly undertaking internships with no progression routes within those organisations
Non-Monetary Indicators and Multiple Dimensions: The ESRI Approach to Poverty Measurement
Get PDFThis paper seeks to distil the lessons on poverty measurement from a period that extends back to the early days of poverty research at the ESRI in the mid to late 1980s. What was the problem to which non-monetary indicators was the solution? How were the indicators chosen and justified? What have we learned about the role and limitations of non-monetary indicators? What are the key future challenges? It makes clear that a variety of approaches are required to do justice to the complex and multi-faceted nature of poverty. The essential elements of the definition of poverty underpinning the research at the ESRI has been that poverty is something rooted in a lack of resources that results in exclusion from the customary standard of living. In pursuing such understanding over the last thirty years, the ESRI research programme has sought to develop measures exhibiting satisfactory levels of reliability and validity which are subject to re-evaluation in changing circumstances. The paper demonstrates that, viewed from a broader sociological perspective on social stratification, the fact that the complexities of poverty and social exclusion are far from being adequately captured by a single indicator relating to current disposable income is not surprising. Measurement of poverty must be viewed within a broader framework relating to the socially structured nature of disadvantage and social inequality. As a consequence poverty targets need to be framed in a manner which focuses attention on long-term structural issues
Virtual Surgery: Facing the Future!
Get PDFIn 1979, Hounsfield and Cormack won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology for their part in the invention of the CT scanner (Peeters et al, 1979). These images allowed human anatomy to be viewed in3 dimensions for the first time, revolutionising medicine. Virtual surgical planning was used for the first time in craniofacial surgery during the 1980’s (Vannier et al, 1984). With increasing popularity, computer technology now encompasses a number of usesin addition to surgical planning, across a number of specialities such as neurosurgery, cardiothoracics, plastics, ENT and orthopaedics. This report describes the use of a virtual surgical planning in an interesting maxillofacial case