Staff at the Abbey Theatre are to seek assurances from the Arts Council about the security of their jobs in light of the council's threat to withdraw the venue's funding.
The council expressed anger this week over the theatre's financial crisis and said it would fund its operating costs only for the next month.
After that, no funding would be made available unless a decision was taken in the meantime to establish a new company and new board to run the theatre, it said.
Siptu official Jane Boushell said yesterday staff were concerned about the latest developments. They had been told only last month by the theatre's management that their jobs were safe.
She would be seeking a meeting with the Arts Council to ask for assurances that funding for the national theatre would be maintained and employment secured. The staff, she added, had played an active role in addressing the issues facing the Abbey in co-operation with management and other interested parties.
These had been working together as part of the consultative forum set up on foot of the recommendations of a working party which examined the Abbey's financial difficulties last year.
Siptu represents about 75 of the Abbey's 90-plus staff.
The threat by the Arts Council to withdraw funding was issued on Monday after it considered a KPMG consultants' report into how the theatre lost €1.8 million in 2004, its centenary year, and failed to record €900,000 of that loss until well into this year.
Council chairwoman Olive Braiden said members were "extremely angry at the sheer extent of mismanagement of public funds". The council was determined to save the Abbey as a major national institution, she said, but the reality was that this could be done only with a new company and a new board.
She said the council would insist that the National Theatre Society, which owns the Abbey, commits at its forthcoming egm to dissolving itself on the day a new board and company are established.
"If the National Theatre Society does not agree to dissolve itself in favour of new structures, the Arts Council will make no further funding available."
