Learn to use, not abuse culture

Brendan Kennelly and Jürgen Eckhardt Dublin 1996

After the Myth of the City, Phil Cooke advised that we seek an application to the call for proposals of the Article 10 ERDF programme . Together with Jürgen Eckhardt, we undertook it to gain an Irish partner. Galway seemed to be the most suitable and best contact after some initial research. Before we went to Galway by a rented car through the Irish landscape with its small whisky producers along the way, and incredible turn-abouts of narrow roads, we visited Brendan Kennelly at Trinity college to seek his advise. And what advise he gave us at that time. It became the key objective of the five we ascribed to CIED, namely "learn to use, not to abuse culture." The ERDF Article 10 programme had foreseen a double goal: see how culture can create jobs and how to prevent that over commercialization of culture ends up destroying cultural identities. Before we set off in the car, Brendan Kennelly having become to us like a father, gave us well packed sandwiches and something to drink, while assuring us he had phoned with Galway to tell them in advice to be good and kind to us. We could not have a better recommendation from anyone else. Here speaks a man who can make Toyoto car salesmen, Irish men at that, during a two hour lecture sober. His voice was famous when Toyoto used it for advertisement purposes. That threw up naturally ethical questions but when a taxi driver who had lost his wife was able to bring up his three sons by reading to them the poetry of Brendan Kennelly, then you understand he was one of the people and they followed him not worship like but in listening to his voice, they found their own voices ready to speak up freely. After all it was a time in Ireland that they had learned on how to get out of a crisis best done by letting poets set the urban agenda. Without knowing it at that time, Galway did not only become one of the strongest and most reliable partners within the CIED project, but due to the first CIED conference held in Galway, we met Michael D. Higgins who went on to become President of Ireland in 2013. It is a long way to go before the poetic voice reaches the top, but then Ireland would be something else without its poets.

Hatto Fischer

Athens April 2014

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Learn to use, not abuse culture