Irish Writers Centre Needs Support

I was totally gobsmacked when the arts council decided to cut funding from the Irish Writers centre. I get their newsletter and in it was the following signed statement - I'd like to bring this to your attention:

The signed statement is as follows:

The Arts Council has recently terminated all funding to The Irish Writers’ Centre, an important national institution for the support, development and promotion of writers and writing. While we acknowledge that cuts are inevitable in the present economic downturn, this decision is nevertheless disturbing. It comes at the end of a notably successful year for the Centre, a year which has seen audience numbers and the Centre’s participation in the country’s literary culture at an all-time high. We therefore strongly urge that this decision be reversed and funding for the work of a thriving cultural organisation (€200,000 in 2008) be reinstated urgently.



John Banville

Sebastian Barry

Maeve Binchy

Dermot Bolger

John Boyne

Liam Browne

Ciaran Carson

Prof. Danielle Clarke

Harry Clifton

Dr. Steve Coleman

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Philip Cummings

Peter Cunningham

John F. Deane

Celia De Fréine

Roddy Doyle

Paul Durcan

Anne Enright

Prof. Tadhg Foley,

Richard Ford

David Gardiner,

Prof. Luke Gibbons, University of Notre Dame

Hugo Hamilton

Dr Derek Hand, St Patrick's College, Dublin

Kerry Hardie

Sean Hardie

Jack Harte

Aidan Higgins

Alannah Hopkin

Jerzy Jarniewicz

Prof. Margaret Kelleher, NUI, Maynooth

Claire Kilroy

Edna Longley, Professor Emerita, Queen’s University Belfast

Michael Longley, Ireland Professor of Poetry

Deirdre Madden

Derek Mahon

Prof. Kerby A. Miller, University of Missouri

Prof. Sean Moore, University of New Hampshire

Paul Muldoon

Éilis Ní Dhuibhne

Dr. Clare O'Halloran, University College Cork

Sean O’Brien

Joseph O'Connor

Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin ("Cormac Millar")

Timothy O’Grady

Glenn Patterson

Justin Quinn

Ian Sansom

Will Self

Matthew Sweeney

Prof. Lawrence Taylor, NUI, Maynooth

Alan Titley

Shaun Traynor

Prof. Kevin Whelan, Director, Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, Dublin

Jonathan William

2009 - A year of writing dangerously – my new years resolution

I really enjoy the works of Umberto Eco, they are literary, scientific, clever, funny, educational, enthralling and entertaining. Linguistically layered and complexly constructed with considerable craft, each bravely offers the masterful expression of dangerous ideas. Something to which a writer like moi should aspire maybe ?

Should I assume that the birth of a dangerous idea for 2009 might mimic their unscrupulously inauspicious gestation in previous years ? i.e. start as seemingly innocent exploratory inquiries like:

‘Can we minimize causalities as we search for peace ?’

or...

‘How do we pull apart the very fabric of the universe while smashing together subatomic particles we don’t actually understand?'

or even how about...

“I’ve had enough of my capitalist extortion, material greed and controlling society, I think I may confess to stealing from my own bank, my own clients, my own society, my very own soul”.

Such infant ideas, while patently wrong, ill-judged or reflectively abhorrent, at such an early stage, are not genuinely dangerous in that classic Eco sense. Those may pose some moral dangers, they maybe evoke equally idiotic reasoning and speculation leading to dangerous action but their initial ‘dangerousness’ is confined to local or specialist audiences or specific knowledge communities. It’s really only when they have been implemented and disseminated to the great unwashed or unread do they become truly dangerous.

A genuinely dangerous idea – the earth isn’t flat, God has a sense of humor, there is more truth in fiction than in fact, BTW the world is choking on Carbon Dioxide; from first expression these hold the potential to change the human paradigm, change the very nature of being on this planet, undermining current understanding, questioning the fundamentals of our personal existence. Will such an idea emerge in 2009 ? While I truly admire popular modern scientists who write, eg Richard Dawkins, Dan Gilbert, Anderson, Gladwell, et al, etc, I don’t believe any of the ideas they have eloquently propounded in their recent books (generally borrowed anyway) can be categorized as dangerous.

Original Work from writers, Ruskin, Pascal, Orwell, Swift, Joyce, Beckett, like Eco, is firmly founded on ideas, skillfully underlayed (no speedy Gonzales jokes plz) with suggestions and questions which change how we potentially provide ourselves with answers. The subtlety employed beyond a scientists’ soapbox ‘here’s what I think, this is what I know’ style of intellectual provocation, the writing becomes dangerous, not only because it contains dangerous ideas but because it acquires a new value in and of itself. Such stuff of value is what I want to learn more about in 2009.

As a writer I do learn by reading yes, but must also learn by writing, writing is the only place value can lie for me if I consider myself a genuinely creative writer. In 2009, that’s the only value I’ll be seeking to create, as I embrace dangerously muddled complex expressions of dangerous and hopefully entertaining ideas. As ever I’m equally prepared to be entirely wrong about striving to write dangerously. While that idea itself may well be dangerous for me in that its attempted execution could mean just that for my writing. At the very minimum I do look forward to trying to be dangerous on the page/web and in approach. I'm looking forward to it.

Happy New Year.