Published in The Journal of Music on Monday 13 October 2025.

In July 2014, Heather Humphreys was appointed Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. Six years after the economic crash, it remained a grim time for artists. The Arts Council budget had been cut for seven consecutive years, from €83m in 2007 to €56.7m in 2014 – a 32% drop and a complete stripping back of the arts and music ecosystem. A few months beforehand, the then Director of the Arts Council, Orlaith McBride, had said that, for artists, this period was about ‘a fundamental issue of survival’. 

Minister Humphreys arrived at a turning point, therefore, and had a decision to make. Was she willing to stand up for artists and restore Arts Council funding? The answer was no. That autumn she increased the Arts Council budget by just 0.35%, or €200k – from €56.7m to €56.9m. It was a tiny sum in a crisis, and encapsulated the priorities of the government, but it was not because she did not have the finances. Instead of restoring Arts Council funding, her department began planning the launch of an entirely new arts body – Creative Ireland – and it was launched during Humphreys’ tenure in December 2016. The ambitions of Creative Ireland were admirable – to provide creative opportunities for children, and who could argue with that? – but to direct scarce arts money towards an entirely new project with all the duplication of administrative expenses that that entails, rather than try to address the situation facing artists, was a serious misjudgment. It was subsequently revealed that Creative Ireland spent over €1.5m on a website and advertising in its first year.

The following year, Humphreys increased the Arts Council budget by €3.2m to €60.1m. This was the right direction, but the government’s thinking on the arts was still inconsistent. On the one hand, in March 2017, Humphreys could say that she was ‘always struck by the important role which the arts and culture play in bringing people together at local level and contributing to people’s quality of life’. And her party colleague Leo Varadkar said – when he was running for the leadership of Fine Gael – that he was going to double arts funding over seven years, thus raising expectations. But their actual budget decisions didn’t reflect those values or ambitions. The allocation of an extra €5m – leaving the Arts Council still almost €20m down on its 2007 figure – led to the then Chair of the Arts Council, Sheila Pratschke, stating that there is ‘huge disappointment across the arts sector today’.

In November 2017, Humphreys moved on from the arts brief and became Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, but the legacy of her decision-making was an arts sector that remained depleted when things could have been different. When the pandemic came in 2020 and the arts and music sector collapsed, artists had already seen a lost decade. 

Catherine Connolly has never been in power, and therefore did not have to make the decisions that faced Humphreys, but she did make an important interjection in the Dáil debate on the arts during the pandemic in May 2020. In response to the lack of action by the government, she challenged the new Minister for Arts, Josepha Madigan, and said:

As I listen to you and I listen to previous governments, the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’ comes to mind – the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or attitudes particularly in relation to behaviour. So we treasure the arts – and we certainly treasure them on a national and international basis – but then practically we give them very little. 

It laid bare what was happening and it was widely quoted. A few months later, with the arrival of Catherine Martin of the Greens, things improved radically, but Connolly continued to speak out on the arts and kept the pressure up.

Turning up
I am a constituent of Connolly’s, and I have emailed her on arts matters over the years, but I do not know her personally. Nevertheless, her support for the arts and culture has been notable. She has dedicated herself to learning Irish over many years and is now fluent.

In July 2023, when Music Alliance Ireland – a collective of national music organisations – had their first Galway meeting, and every politician in the city and county was invited, Connolly was, to the best of my recollection, the only public representative who turned up. She spoke knowledgeably about the situation facing the music community in Galway.

In February of this year, I launched a book at Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway, and again invited public representatives from city and county. Again, it was Connolly who turned up. As it happened, the event may have played a part in the beginning of her presidential campaign. The actor Stephen Rea was launching the book, and the first thing he did was to point to Connolly in the audience and say ‘there is a job coming up’ and encouraged her to run. The room applauded, but Connolly seemed surprised by the suggestion and immediately demurred.

Being Minister for Arts after an economic crash brings challenges, but that’s when you need vision. Heather Humphreys had an opportunity to improve artists’ lives at the time and did not use it effectively.

Connolly has spoken out on behalf of artists and has turned up for them when it mattered. If she is elected as President, I expect she will do the same.