The Phoenix Vol.38 No.13

THE PHOENIX JULY 3, 2020 17
SOCIETY H STAGE H SCREEN H SEX H SOUNDS H SPORTS H SIGHTS H SOCIETY
ROSE
McHUGH’S
GOOD NEWS
ON HER way out the door of
the Department of Culture,
Josepha Madigan dished out
€102,000 to the Crawford Art
Gallery in Cork. It is the latest
piece of good news for the
Rose McHugh-chaired national
cultural institution.
The money is linked to
two proposed exhibitions for
the Decade of Centenaries
programme, including one around
the death of Terence McSwiney
in 1920 after a 74-day hunger
strike.
Late last year, Madigan
approved a grant of €184,000
to upgrade the environmental
controls in the gallery, the start
of a proposed major upgrading
of the building provided for in
the bloated Project 2040 plan,
which has earmarked a spend of
€460m on the national cultural
institutions over 10 years.
Rose McHugh will be
anxious to ensure there is no
backsliding on this by the new
government and presumably a
meeting with the
new arts minister,
Catherine
Martin, will be top
of the chair’s to-do
list.
The Crawford’s
current board
consists of 11
members, with
one outstanding
vacancy, created
after the Cork City
Council nominee
on the board,
Ken O’Flynn,
stepped down in January to
contest the general election. He
had been passed over by FF as a
candidate and stood instead as
an independent, narrowly missing
out on a seat in Cork North.
O’Flynn’s replacement on the
Glucksman board has yet to be
selected by the council.
The most recent arrivals (and
the only directors appointed
by Madigan during her tenure)
are Louise Crowley, senior
lecturer in UCC’s faculty of law,
specialising in family law; and
former Arup engineer Sean
Rose McHugh
Clarke (who has the benefit
of having studied European art
history).
Crowley was in the news
recently when she announced
the introduction in UCC of a
mandatory anti-sex abuse course
for new students.
Others on the
board include
IADT’s Josephine
Browne, who
chairs the
Crawford’s
artistic policy
committee; and
architect Gareth
O’Callaghan,
who is a member
of the all-important
building and
development
committee, chaired
by McHugh.
This is the committee
overseeing the ambitious
restoration project for the
building that holds the Crawford
art collection – a property that
is actually in the ownership of
Cork Education and Training
Board (ETB). The complicated
structure is one that McHugh has
been looking to unravel since her
appointment in March 2017 (by
then culture minister Heather
Humphreys) in conjunction
with the gallery’s finance and legal
committee, chaired by Cork City
Council manager Ann Doherty.
Progress has been made
on this front and last year the
art collection itself (over 4,000
works) was transferred by Cork
ETB to the Crawford. Meanwhile,
a lease was entered into between
Cork ETB and the gallery to
cover the period until the
300-year-old building’s ownership
is finally transferred to the OPW,
a move that will allow for the
overdue refurbishment.
On the financial front, the
Crawford remains in the black
despite its modest €1.5m approx
revenue grant from the culture
department. There has been an
improvement in the last couple
of years and the current director
of the gallery, Mary McCarthy
(ex-National Sculpture Factory),
has had her remuneration pegged
to principal officer level (she is
on around €83,000 pa) after the
Crawford top job had for years
been tied to assistant principal
level, making the post a less-thanattractive
one when compared
with other national cultural
institutions.
The 2019 annual report,
signed off by the C&AG last
October, showed a surplus for
the year of €170,000, significantly
up on 2018.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: (01) 661 1062
SARAH DILLON’S WRAPPED HANDOUTS
FANS OF GOLDHAWK will
be familiar with the workings of
the Western Region Audiovisual
Producer’s (Wrap) Fund, headed
up by Sarah Dillon. It is a
development and production
scheme floated by local
authorities in Clare, Donegal,
Galway, Mayo, Roscommon and
Sligo, with support and backing
from Galway Film Centre,
the Western Development
Commission and Udárás na
Gaeltachta (see The Phoenix
17/5/19). The smart players have
clearly adapted quickly.
The idea behind the fund
is to support companies
in the film, TV and games
sectors to increase the level of
development and production in
the west of Ireland. From the
outset, however, it was clear that
much of the moolah went to gigs
developed outside the region.
The first Wrap-backed
production shot in the region
was Calm With Horses, made
under the auspices of Andrew
Lowe and Ed Guiney’s Element
Pictures, whose offices are in
London and Dublin. But, in order
to be in a position to qualify
as locals, the ‘special-purpose
vehicle’ company set up for the
film was based at Element’s Pálás
Cinema in Galway.
So when Goldhawk read the
latest PR release – headlined
“Wrap Fund set to generate
more than €16m
spend across
the West of
Ireland” – it was
not too surprising
that many of
the producers
featured are those
nimble enough to
establish outposts
in the fertile Wrap
region.
For example,
one of the headline
projects is God’s
Creatures, a feature
film backed by BBC Films and
Screen Ireland, and to be filmed
in Donegal, with UK-based
tyro producer Fodhla Cronin
O’Reilly in the driving seat. A
special-purpose vehicle company,
God’s Creatures DAC, was set
up for the project on March 11,
c/o the address of a relative of
Cronin O’Reilly in Co Galway.
David Collins of Samson
Films in Dublin set up MSML
Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly
Film Productions DAC in Spiddal
in Galway on March 20 for his
Nordic co-production, My Sailor
My Love, backed by the Finnish
Film Foundation, Finnish Council
of Arts, Creative Europe, YLE,
UMedia, Screen
Ireland, WRAP and
Nordisk Film & TV.
The TV series
Smother starring
Dervla Kirwan
– co-produced by
Rob Walpole
and Rebecca
O’Flanagan’s
Dublin-based
Rubicon Films
and financed by
BBC Studios, RTÉ,
BBC, the Western
Development
Commission and Screen Ireland
– is currently on production
stoppage due to the pandemic.
The special-purpose vehicle
company set up in June last year,
Smother Productions DAC, has
an address at the Lahinch Coast
Hotel.
Long-time collaborators
Brendan Muldowney and
Conor Barry, whose Savage
Productions is based in Dublin,
set up Kiera Films DAC in
Strandhill in Sligo on May 6 this
year for their impending horror
genre production, The Ten
Steps, which is backed by Screen
Ireland.
A Sligo base was also found
last year for director (and Screen
Ireland board member) Marian
Quinn’s Janey Films, which had
been based for two decades
in Leitrim (ie not in the ‘Wrap
zone’). This proved useful for
the funding of Quinn’s impending
feature film Della & Jim, which
has also been backed by Screen
Ireland.
Given there’s all the local
lolly for the movie and television
producers, it’s surprising that
Wrap has joined the Western
AV Forum to make “a formal
request to the Irish government”
to extend the Section 481 tax
credit regional uplift on the
grounds that “the Regions
have not benefited from the
intended production increase
and infrastructural development
promised from the initiative”.
Goldhawk reckons that
new arts minister Catherine
Martin’s in-tray is going to be
overflowing with such requests.