Coughlan: I was going to refuse grant
OUTSPOKEN jazz and blues singer Mary Coughlan said she f eels ‘ conflicted’ after being named as one of the artists who will receive the Government’s Recording Stimulus Fund grant.
Nearly € 900,000 i n funding for musicians was announced by Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD on Monday.
Some 1,431 artists applied for funding from the Music Industry Stimulus Package to help musicians whose careers have been put on the backburner due to Covid but just 184 applicants were successful.
Coughlan was awarded €6,000 to create a jazz album by the Government scheme but she told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘I was going to hand it back because I feel really bad about it. I feel really conflicted about it.
‘I have an album out at the moment. I just released it two months ago and
I paid for it myself,’ she said of Life Stories, which cost her €26,000 and took two years to make.
The grants range from €1,020 up to € 6,000, so she has secured the maximum amount for an album that she now has to make before the end of 2021.
Contractually, those awarded the grants have to announce that they received the Government funding – something Coughlan wasn’t delighted about. She said: ‘You have to do what they tell you to. They monitor your response on Facebook... I feel really bad about that as well.’
She added wistfully: ‘ Look it, I should be grateful and I just feel so f***ing bad. I just feel really, really bad. I sound so bitter but I really feel bad about this...
‘If they were going to make it fair and equitable, it should have been one payment for each person that applied.’ Her main frustrations are for her friends who were unsuccessful in their grant applications.
‘It’s a s***show of a year and the whole procedure is a s***show, and only 13% of people who applied for it got it, you know? It’s just unfortunate,’ she said. ‘So many f***ing people that I know, they were so absolutely devastated because they’ve albums ready to go, to record and they didn’t get it. I think it should have been a lottery.’
She posted about being awarded the funding on Saturday night and said: ‘I actually said it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.’
This year has been beyond trying for her, as she added: ‘I’ve lost all my work for this year and I put all my money that I saved up for two years into my album, [I] couldn’t even get the f***ing Late Late Show. They said they had no room for me this year. They couldn’t fit me in. My album went into the British charts at number f***ing 12. No other Irish artist, to my knowledge, that happened to them this year and I couldn’t f***ing get anything from them.’
She believes the Government should have made more funding available to help her industry.
Coughlan added that the grant process is ‘turning people against each other, and creating a lot of division and ill will and ill feeling among people’.
‘It should be something to feel good about but for me, it’s not.’
The 64- year- old believes more should be done for her contemporaries as she vented her upset. She added: ‘I don’t know why they gave it to me, because I’m old or something or because it might shut me up.’
‘Maybe they gave it to me to shut me up’