New city arts plan aims to provide more arts spaces, and more money for artists

The white lace curtains on the first floor of 33 Synge Street are in tatters.

Construction work was ongoing in the two-storey terraced house next door to 33, the birthplace of playwright George Bernard Shaw on Friday morning.

But there wasn’t any sign of activity in Shaw’s childhood home, which between 1993 and 2012 had served as a museum.

Since around 2016, when former Labour Councillor Mary Freehill suggested it, there’s been a plan to turn it into an artist’s residence.

The roof of the heritage building has been repaired, according to a report to the council’s South East Area Committee back in July, and the plan still is to turn it into an artist’s residence.

“Maybe for a writer or two,” the council’s city arts officer, Ray Yeates, said Monday.

There was local interest in turning it back into a museum, Yeates said. “But that would require a degree of revenue funding that probably won’t work,” he said.

Plans were paused because the City Architects had a project backlog due to a number of vacancies, the July report to the committee said.

Now, the council’s new City Arts Plan, for the period up to 2028, commits again to getting the Synge Street residency open, as part of a larger objective to provide 300 more workspaces for artists throughout the city.

That’s just one of the strands in the plan, which also looks at opening out further who chooses public art for the city, and granting more money to artists.

It was promising to see the Arts Office commit to raise its grant funding from €800,000 to €1 million by 2028, Green Party councillor Donna Cooney said on Friday.

“It’s ambitious when I look at the arts plans going all the way back to the 90s,” she said.

Increase in funding

The City Arts Plan – now a bit delayed – provides an outline of the council’s intended actions and objectives for the arts across the period of 2024 to 2028.

The final draft was brought before the Community, Gaeilge, Sport, Arts and Culture Strategic Policy Committee last Monday, 24 February, by Yeates.

Broken down into eight separate priorities including infrastructure, public art, inclusion and engaging young people, among its chief objectives will be to increase arts grants to €1 million over the coming three years.

The council had raised its grant fund from €550,000 to €800,000 last year, Yeates said on Monday. “We’ll be trying to increase it next year incrementally. It’s not a very big increase we’re talking about.”

Currently, the City Arts Office is carrying out a two-year pilot scheme for the allocation of the €250,000 increase in the latest budget, by providing €50,000 to each of the council’s five administration areas, the plan says.

Known as the Community Development Grant, each administrative area will allocate between €5,000 and €20,000 to different projects in their locale.

For 2025, the council awarded €550,000 in grants to 45 different projects, including €32,000 for the Dublin Fringe Festival, €10,000 for Axis Ballymun, €8,000 to Fatima Groups United, and €6,996 for the Profiles journal, which is currently on its third issue.

More space

Another target set by the plan is to provide 300 new artists’ workspaces, in partnership with agencies both public and private, including through the council’s 5 percent policy.

The plan says 50 artists should be brought into council-owned buildings Artane Place, the former Filmbase centre in Temple Bar, and on Merchant’s Quay this year.

Give Us The Night campaigner and arts committee member Sunil Sharpe asked at the meeting about the current status of the former Filmbase building on Curved Street.

John Foley, the council’s culture, recreation and economic services manager, said the building has three tenants in it, but the ground floor and basement aren’t being used. “Because there are significant works to do.”

The council is at the design stage however, with architects due to go into the building soon, he said.

Dublin Youth Theatre has been allocated those spaces, he said. “They’re occupying an office space currently there at the moment.”

In all, the council’s has €9.5 million available for artists’ workspaces, according to a 24 February report to the committee.

That includes €6 million set aside for doing up 8-9 Merchant’s Quay, €1.5 million for an arts and community building on Bridgefoot Street, €500,000 for the former Eden restaurant in Meeting House Square, €1 million for Filmbase, and €500,000 for Artane Place.

The plan also intends to address the current deficit in venues across the city, specifically aiming to review its July 2023 feasibility study for a new 500-seat performing arts space.

The council also intends to identify, through an open-call process, a sustainable future use for the former DIT College of Music on Chatham Row, the plan says. It is currently run as studio spaces by Flux.

Although the council had floated the idea of turning this property into a civic museum in October 2022, this plan was discarded by November 2023, in favour of keeping it as a studio and exhibition space.

The city still needs a civic museum, said Social Democrats Councillor Cat O’Driscoll. “We’ve a huge archive that the City Archivist is still cataloguing.”

But, realistically, it would cost millions to turn the Chatham Row building into a museum, she said. “Whereas for it to be used as studios, as it is now, it’s perfectly set up. There was no investment needed to massively transform it.”

As part of its ongoing effort to address the city’s deficit in cultural infrastructure, via policies like the “5 percent” scheme – which requires developers to include cultural or community space within developments exceeding 10,000sqm – the council has also committed to produce an arts and cultural infrastructure policy by December 2025.

Citizen commissioners

In the area of public art, the plan makes a commitment to appoint “citizen commissioners” of art.

That’s part of the city’s Public Art Programme (2021 to 2026), which suggests involving communities and neighbourhoods in the commissioning of public art works.

Appointing citizen commissioners is an idea that was a long time in the works, and which would involve a “civilian” in the process, Yeates said on Monday.

“Somebody who doesn’t come from an arts background, isn’t a curator or practitioner, and who lives in a particular place, and would be able to play a significant role in commissioning art,” he said.

Currently, the council has used citizen commissioners as part of the Arts Office-supported scheme Creative Places Darndale and in Dolphin House in Dublin 8, Yeates said. “Eventually, there’ll be mini commissions, and hopefully larger commissions.”

The plan has set a target, over the next three years, of getting the citizen commissioner to commission a piece of work annually.

Councillors and other members of the arts committee welcomed the plan after Yeates presented it to them on 24 February.

The next step is for it to go for a vote by the full council at one of its monthly meetings.