A Nation's Voice: Funding Irish Music as a Cultural Resource, 2008–2018

The purpose of this study is to provide a critical assessment and analysis of State funding of Irish music through the Arts Council and of its relationship with music as expressed through several key musical events between 2008 and 2018. The research for this work included primary data in the form of a survey who’s target was musicians in Ireland and secondary data in the form of collating all Arts Council funding allocations for music from 2008 to 2016 and categorising each allocation by genre. Key musical events; Ceiliúradh, A Nation’s Voice, and Shane MacGowan’s 60th Birthday Celebration took place in 2014, 2016 and 2018 respectively. Through providing an explanation of the mechanism of this engagement this thesis argues music is utilised by the State as a form of soft power who’s function is to enforce a dominant cultural hegemony. A central argument of this thesis is that this soft power, manifest through the tendency of the Arts Council to predominantly fund classical & contemporary music, can be explained in terms of class bias and that the Arts Council, as an apparatus of the State, implements its funding practices and policies within the parameters of neoliberal ideology in a broader context of globalisation. The findings of this thesis suggest that there is a class bias evident in the Arts Council’s funding allocations and this class bias serves the State in its project of nation branding. An additional finding is that the State will engage with popular music only once it has achieved some degree of commercial success abroad.