Irish Writers' Centre Gets Its Funding Cut; Booker Prize Winners ProtestThe Arts Council of Ireland has decided to cut all funding to the Irish Writers' Centre, causing stirring speeches all across the Emerald Isle. The speeches have led to thousands of drunken and indignant punches thrown at crass youth, followed by sobbing confessions to faithless spouses late at night, confessions crowned by mechanically-distant sex acts, and then fitful dreams of past glory, past love, and past youth.
Irish writers across the globe have joined in condemning the Arts Council's decision. Booker Prize winners such as Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, and Anne Enright have all said "What the fuck," in addition to American expatriates such as Richard Ford. These Irish writers have created a petition calling for a reversal, saying, in no uncertain terms:
"WHAT THE FUCK, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED SONS OF NUNWHORES. WHAT THE FUCK ELSE DOES IRELAND HAVE GOING FOR IT? THIS IS WHAT WE DO. IN JAPAN, THEY MAKE ELECTRONICS, IN ENGLAND, THEY MAKE SMOKING JACKETS, AND HERE IN IRELAND WE MAKE FUCKING LITERATURE."
You can add your voice to the outraged din by signing the petition here.
The government gives the Irish Writers' Centre 200,000 pounds a year. The Centre uses this money to pay the electric bill, buy crates of Ramen, and pay precisely four employees, two of whom will now be fired. Next door to the Irish Writers' Centre is the Dublin Writers Museum, and underneath both buildings is the Chapter One restaurant. The Irish Writers' Centre is famous as a venue for literary readings and as a place where poets can sleep when they are between "big scores."
According to its official mission statement, the Centre exists in Dublin "to maintain Ireland's position in World literature." Duties include calling up-and-coming young novelists from other countries in the middle of the night and reading threatening limericks, organizing Dublin's Bloomsday, and mailing other countries huge, rotten bags of sheep shit every time one of their writers wins the Nobel Prize.
According to the Guardian, the Centre will try and raise money through benefit nights and creative writing courses, and employees there who currently exist in paid positions will keep working there on a voluntary basis until things are stabilized.
There is a tradition about writers in Ireland. When they are not respected, they use their talents to whip up the people into a poetic frenzy leading to murder, revolution, and the arbitrary redistribution of wealth.
Keeping Irish writers happy is not just a nice gesture for the Republic: cynically, it is a gesture of political expedience that ought not to be stopped, lest the repercussions be bloody and dramatic, precisely the sort of thing that will be so much fun to read about in the future, but will not be much fun for for people in charge right now.
Just give the Centre its money back. Raise taxes, or something.
Posted by miracle on Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:41:09 -0500 -- permanent link
