At around midnight on New Year’s Eve last, I stood with friends and family and listened as the bells of St Nicholas rang out across Galway City, their wonderful peals soaring high into the night sky, hanging there and waiting until the ship’s horns in the bay answered their call. It was a fitting moment; the juncture of the civic and maritime, two key attributes of the city over many centuries.
On that night, the bells rang to mark 700 years of St Nicholas standing proud over the city, and now setting off a magically-numbered year that would send the culture of Galway around the world.
It was a night when there seemed so many possibilities; that we could fulfil the potential of all that had been promised; that we would create a unique sense of place in a once in a generation happening.
Alas, that did not happen, and instead of being energised at year’s end, our artists and singers and writers and performers are left desolate, unemployed, without any end in sight to their deprivation.
And so I welcome the news that the Government is considering a leg-up to the artistic and cultural community of the country. As a city and county, Galway is more reliant on their innovation and imagination than many other places. Our persona is built on it; it is used to create an image that attracts large companies to base themselves here; it invites students to come and learn here; its notes and airs and monologues create a picture of the city that attracts millions of tourists.
Every sector of our community has been impacted by the pandemic, but most of us have the capacity to get back to work in some small way, to be innovative about how we create goods and services, but the artistic and musical and cultural community have not.
They have been denied the lifeblood of their efforts — an audience. The footlights have been dimmed; the energy that is created between a crowd and a performer has been lost. Temporarily.
Because there has been a homogeneity of experience, the absence of difference has been denied those who write, who compose, who perform — and behind that, the impact is massive on those who control the sound desks, scale the heights for the lighting rigs, plug in the amps for the performers; clean and prepare the venues for the events.
A whole industry has been switched off, and many of those who worked in it were left with little or no income, and a minuscule prospect of an end in sight.
When restrictions change in a few weeks time, it is unlikely that they will alter dramatically for those who work in our creative industries, but what they do is vital to how we see ourselves. In this, the great time of centenaries, we are minded of the need to preserve what we were so that we can become what we want to be.
Culture is the name of all that we are interested in; to keep our minds busy and fulfilled. It is time again for the industry to be supported so that it can regenerate and make the music, the drama, the poetry, the fiction of the next decade and beyond, perhaps mirror in culture the vulnerability we have all felt at this time.
We all need the lift that culture can give us. It is time the music came back into our lives.
