Temple Bar Properties, the State agency in charge of Dublin's designated cultural quarter, has warned that its continued development "will be in jeopardy" unless it receives aid from the Arts Council.
TBP has appealed against a decision by the council last month to reject its application for funding, saying this would have "serious repercussions" for its cultural objectives and for the "broader communities of artists, audiences and the public at large".
In a letter to the director of the Arts Council, Ms Patricia Quinn, who is a former cultural director of TBP, the company's general manager, Ms Tambra Dillon, pointed out its "very limited annual budget" could no longer subsidise cultural programmes to the same extent.
Though it had been successful in raising money from the private sector, she said TBP had applied to the Arts Council for grant-aid to secure adequate funding for its cultural projects, including the area's annual summer festival, billed as "Diversions".
Ms Dillon said the application had been made for 2002 "with encouragement from the Arts Council", in anticipation of a favourable response. Against that background, she found the council's decision to deny funding to Temple Bar "incomprehensible".
"Now, at this late date, and in the absence of any grant-aid, Temple Bar Properties will be forced to cut or curtail scheduled programmes across the board, at the exact moment when its future cultural mission and public purpose is most vulnerable", she warned.
Ms Dillon said she was "equally distressed by the inherent contradiction" in the council's justification for rejecting the application on the basis that it did not meet the published criteria and that only existing funding commitments were being honoured.
The rejection letter came a day before TBP was to meet its assigned council officer to discuss the application. "In effect, the letter says that the Arts Council is a closed shop, but the published criteria continue to indicate otherwise," she told Ms Quinn.
"Nonetheless, we subsequently met with our assigned officer and were told that our application was well received and the cultural programmes managed by Temple Bar Properties mirrored the published criteria in all respects", Ms Dillon said.
"We were also told that the Arts Council considered Temple Bar Properties to be an important resource organisation for the arts and, in many respects, viewed it as a strategic partner in assisting the Arts Council to further its mission", her letter stated.
Appealing for the decision to be reconsidered, she said that while the Arts Council had only secured a modest increase in its budget for 2002, it was "incomprehensible that it would abandon its published criteria in favour of maintaining a previously established status quo".
Ms Dillon said that considering each application on its own merit would be "not only the fairest process, but also ensure the best possible outcome for spending public monies to promote artistic excellence, develop audiences and build capacity within the arts sector".
She was disheartened that TBP's long-standing commitment to the Arts Council was not being reciprocated. The "contradictions and lack of clarity" in dealing with its application "have left me with a sense of arbitrary interpretation of expressed criteria", she said.
On January 1st, ownership of TBP was transferred from the Minister for the Environment to Dublin City Council.However, no provision was made in the council's budget for 2002 to fund its activities.
