Money Talks: The real story behind Ireland’s 14 Oscar nominations

Joining Paul Mescal in the list of Irish Oscar nominees are a record-breaking 13 others. Like Mescal, they are there not only for their individual talent, but also because of countless reluctant political decisions to invest in the arts in Ireland.

This investment was often not enough; Most artists in Ireland are still struggling to make a living. Still, those decisions — dating back even to earlier, darker times than the 2010 bailout — have brought money to the arts that could have gone elsewhere.

(Disclosure: I benefit from this investment in my work as a playwright and screenwriter.)

Last week, this investment made a spectacular return. This column is an attempt to trace her roots.

In 1975 a group of friends in Galway formed Druid, the country’s first professional theater company outside of Dublin. The Arts Council began funding them soon after, and has funded them ever since. By the mid-1990s, Druid had an international reputation and an unknown London-Irish writer began sending him plays. Druid’s director Garry Hynes found one of these pieces in the mud; She asked if there were more and was given two more scripts

Two weeks later she flew to London to meet the writer, a shy 25-year-old, and bought the rights to his three plays. When the first of these plays The beauty queen of LeenaneTransferred from Galway to London’s Royal Court and from there to the West End in 1996, Martin McDonagh was suddenly a fixture in international theatre.

But McDonagh’s real ambition was in the film. The Film Board (now Screen Ireland) supported his first short film, revolver. It won an Oscar in 2004; now McDonagh is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay The Banshees by Inisherin. Brendan Gleeson, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, also starred revolver: He started as an actor 20 years earlier with the theater company Passion Machine. Passion Machine wanted to bring theater to new audiences and the Arts Council supported them; soon, even in the midst of “the dreadful economic desert of the 1980s,” as Gleeson recalled before the Oireachtas Arts Committee in 2009, they were playing to packed houses at major theaters.

Ireland has always produced good actors but lacked the resources to train them to the level of the best international music schools like RADA in London. In 2010, Trinity College Dublin, in partnership with RADA and the Cathal Ryan Trust, made a proposal to the Higher Education Authority: they wanted to create such a conservatory, but they needed the HEA to fund it – and they needed it to provide the education to be funded by actors at the same level as they funded the training of doctors.

There was just one problem: the economy had collapsed. Colm McCarthy’s An Bord Snip Nua report last year recommended drastic cuts in arts funding. (“Ireland Inc can rely more on this sector than its economists believe,” I warned in response.) There would be seven years of Arts Council budget cuts. Education has also suffered.

But somehow the HEA agreed to the proposal. Lir Academy opened in 2011 with 16 students – the smallest intake of any major drama school in the world, according to director Loughlin Deegan. “That’s one of the secrets of our success,” he says

While Paul Mescal honed his talent in the lir, a young writer from Mayo honed her writing craft for Arts Council-supported magazines, the Stinging fly and the Dublin review. Then she wrote a novel, and an Arts Council grant for emerging writers gave her time to edit it.

Her second novel was published in 2018 normal people, made Sally Rooney a worldwide literary star. Two years later, Paul Mescal appeared in the television adaptation, making him a global screen star — and putting him on the radar of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Claire Keegan had been a literary star before: her first collection of short stories, Antarctic, had received great recognition in 1999. But writing short stories is not lucrative. In 2007, Keegan received a two-year grant from the Arts Council so she could focus on her stories. One of these stories was called Support financially.

When TG4, the Film Board and the Broadcasting Authority launched a programme, Cine4, aimed at developing Irish language feature films – with the express aim of competing for foreign language Oscars – it caught the attention of director Colm Bairéad. Adjusted Bairead Support financiallyname it A Cailín Ciúinand Cine4 supported it.

I didn’t mention the headline film promotion program, the Section 481 Tax Credit; I don’t have space to list the litany of top-notch actors either banshees and A Cailín Ciúin who have had careers in theater and film productions made possible by Irish public funding.

“The state has almost always failed the arts,” concludes academic (and Chair of the Arts Council) Kevin Rafter in his recent book: Taoisigh and the Arts. The “longstanding and influential point of view” of the civil service was “that state funding of art is money that is lost to the public purse”.

That stance should now be dead and buried: even those uninterested in the work cannot ignore the value of this achievement to the country. As Rafter argues, the arts shouldn’t have to justify themselves in terms of economic returns—but economic returns help.

As Brendan Gleeson said of his work at Passion Machine, where he has worked with Paul Mercier, Roddy Doyle and Liam Cunningham, “It would be interesting to add up the funding that the company has received over its lifetime and place it alongside revenue that the country has produced the careers of those it has fostered.”