Crunch Time

Yikes. The Arts Council is terminating all funding to the Irish Writers’ Centre. With immediate effect. The IWC press release (full text here) notes that the decision "comes at the end of a notably successful year for the Centre, a year which has seen audience numbers and the Centre’s participation in the country’s literary culture at an all-time high".

Obviously, lots of voices are being raised in protest, and hoping for a reversal of the decision.

The news brought to mind To Posterity by Louis MacNeice, probably my favourite poem of all time:

When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?