Sir, – Tim O’Brien’s otherwise excellent article (Home News, July 31st) on the contributions of Colm Ó Briain to the arts and education omitted mention of his role as eirector of the NCAD (2002-2008). Given his many contributions to the arts, it is naturally difficult to capture everything.
However, it seems important to note his extraordinary commitment and achievement at the NCAD. He advanced the cause of that institution’s strategic development in several fundamental ways: expanding infrastructure, renewing curriculums, achieving research recognition and funding for art and design, forging new national and international co-operative ventures, and brokering change in a much-loved but then somewhat conservative milieu. Indeed, the institutional partnerships that he established in the mid-2000s proved to be so vitally important in supporting the institution through the mid-2010s, some of its most difficult years.
It is heartening to know that his combination of precise and formidable intellect and unswerving commitment to the centrality of the arts in Irish public life, has found resonance in the current generation of leadership in Ireland’s national cultural institutions. – Yours, etc,
MICK WILSON,
University of Gothenburg,
Sweden.