Gate chief who earns €230k slams lack of funds for arts
ONE of the country’s highest paid theatre bosses has said it is making his blood boil to see dignitaries visiting Ireland being regaled with tales of Joyce and Beckett – but when it came to funding the arts ‘we do nothing for it’.
Michael Colgan, the outgoing artistic director at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, said the Arts Council needs four times more funding that what it currently receives.
He said it was time people became annoyed at the ‘few crumbs’ thrown at the arts here.
Mr Colgan was the best paid arts administrator in the country in 2014, earning just over €231,300. That year the Arts Council wrote to the theatre to register concerns at the ‘disproportionate’ salary being paid to Mr Colgan. His pay in 2014 included a bonus and pension entitlements.
Asked by RTÉ radio host Katie Hannon yesterday whether he was paid too much, Mr Colgan said recent newspaper reports were wrong and he was paid less than half of what was reported. ‘My salary is not big at all,’ he said. Responding to criticism that he was too safe in the Gate, he said ‘there has been a lot of criticism but don’t forget the Gate is desperately underfunded. The Arts Council pay 20% of our overall funding and in every other place it’s much, much higher.’ He said he was a believer in ‘classical theatre’ and ‘doing plays more or less as they are written’.
The Gate Theatre was giving huge employment to actors, he said.
‘We need – and I’m not whingeing or moaning about this – we need 80 to 85% attendance..
‘It means less invention, less brave, in terms of giving people courage and new starts, but we don’t have a studio theatre. You have to balance the books.
‘If you take the money that we get from the Government, we then generate another three-and-a-half or four million on top of that. What they get back in terms of tax, VAT, tourism value, employment to others, they get their money back. They make money off us.
‘Our current president Michael D was a very good minister for the arts. What he did was visionary.
‘To say that [current minister] Heather Humphreys doesn’t care, I think is unfair because I think she does care. But to put it (arts) in a portfolio with so many other things, it means she has to take her eye off the ball for all of them. It absolutely makes my blood boil the way we pander to presidents and so forth about Joyce, Beckett and Behan,’ he added. ‘We have this thing and we do nothing for it.’