Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

We need to get real about funding the arts in Galway.

Galway City Council last week confirmed its annual arts grants for 2025 was €450,000 – there was broad welcome for the €50,000 increased allocation compared with last year.

On the face of it, 12.5% more was a success. But the reality is, relatively, it’s pittance. The extra €50,000 – the first increase for several years – will hardly cover the cost of inflation.

So, the organisations who benefit from grants would be doing well to stand still, even if they appear better off on paper compared with 2024.

The problem is Galway City Council is not allocating enough funding to arts organisations. And it’s been getting away with it for years. Even when it won the European Capital of Culture, groups who’d toiled for decades to earn that designation were surviving off crumbs from City Hall.

Galway’s local government – elected and management – has been clinging to the coat-tails of the reputation the arts community has created for the city for years. It basks in its glory yet isn’t prepared to properly fund it.

Take Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF) as an example. It got €50,000 this year from the City Council, by far the biggest grant to any organisation, and €14,000 more than the next big ‘winner’, Galway Arts Centre.

GIAF’s allocation was €4,000 more than last year, an 8% increase.

Every grant is welcome to the Artistic Director Paul Fahy and CEO John Crumlish. But let’s be honest, fifty-grand from the Council wouldn’t put a dent in the €3.5 million cost of staging an arts festival of the magnitude and calibre of Galway’s programme.

Income for GIAF in 2023 was just shy of €3.5m, and so the City Council’s €50k represents 1.4% of total income.

And for that they got 97 individual events attended by 400,000 people over a fortnight.

In fairness, the Council gives other resources, such as facilitating a festival garden in Eyre Square (sponsored by a drinks company, presumably because State funding doesn’t cut it), and making sure the city is clean when visitors arrive.

But €50k is a bloody bargain for what GIAF delivers in terms of tourism and reputation.

And yet, as a proportion of its overall arts allocation, the GIAF funding has fallen. It got 11.5% of the overall pie last year and just 11.1% of the total doled out this year.

Remember too, the context. Galway City Council’s total budget in 2025 is €147m. That’s a yearly increase of €25m, and yet the arts get just €50,000 extra – seriously?

Wasteful projects such as the Pálás cinema, delivered over-budget and late; and value-for-money problems at the Arts Council are legitimate stories to highlight. But they are not the norm and most arts organisations are adept at running on shoestring budgets. It’s time the City Council supported them properly.

Pictured: Pegasus from Planete Vapeur, one of the street spectacles at last year’s Arts Festival. The City Council’s grant to the festival for this year is €50k, a paltry amount, given what GIAF delivers for Galway in terms of tourism and reputation.