Dr Charlotte McIvor is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Drama and Theatre Studies as well as one of the co-founders of Active* Consent, an Irish international research-led consent education programmed based at the University of Galway. In addition to her work appearing in multiple journals and edited collections, she is the author of Contemporary Irish Theatre: Histories and Theories (with Ian R. Walsh, 2024), Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards A New Interculturalism, and the co-editor of The Methuen Companion to Interculturalism and Performance (with Daphne P. Lei), Interculturalism and Performance Now: New Directions? (with Jason King), Devised Performance in Irish Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice (with Siobhán O’Gorman) and Staging Intercultural Ireland: Plays and Practitioner Perspectives (with Matthew Spangler). Her work has also appeared in Theatre Research International, Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Irish University Review, Irish Studies Review, and multiple edited collections.

This paper examines the convergence of three revealing strands of arts policy and government agendas for the arts in the Republic of Ireland during and following the Decade of Centenaries (2017-2023). These include the formation of Creative Ireland (founded in 2017 and funded through 2025) as an “all-of-government culture and wellbeing programme” with an “ambition to inspire and transform people, places and communities through creativity,” a resurgence in arts-focused equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives  and a concerted turn towards impact management (including monitoring and evaluation) which is crucial to understanding how the return on investment of the first two is being defended. Key documents and reports indicative of the Irish EDI and impact management turn include Arts Council’s 2021 Equality, Diversity and Inclusion toolkit, Safe to Create’s 2024 report Amplify: A Call Towards Transformative Action and the Arts Council’s 2022 Outcome Measurement Guidebook.

I begin with the energy and promised potential of this new inclusive Irish arts policy moment as most symbolically epitomized by the runaway viral success of the Irish children’s hip-hop groups Kabin Crew (Cork) and Lisdoonvarna Crew’s release of their single, “Spark,” funded by Creative Ireland.  Released on 16 May 2024 for Cruinniú na nÓg (a national day of free creativity for children), the video for the song features a multi-racial and effervescent group of Irish children delivering a driving anthem that has amassed more than 7 million views on YouTube and more than 59 million plays on Spotify to date.  

But whereas “The Spark’s” utopian performative moment captured all that is possible (or ideally postable on social media) when the participants/artists, aim of a project and public reach of a single event align perfectly with policy aims, this paper interrogates how the Republic of Ireland’s deployment of EDI and/or anti-racist rhetorics coupled with creativity discourse and impact measurement trends actually does or does not critically revise European and North American initiatives and histories where much of our most recent policy rhetoric around EDI as well as creativity and wellness originated. Drawing on the work of Claire Bishop (2012) and Eleanora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett (2008) on the UK and Shannon Steen on the US (2023) among others on impact, creativity, neoliberalism and government policy in the participatory arts and beyond, I explore whether our Irish remix of globalised arts policy trends productively builds on and potentially decolonises some of these origins or simply repurposes them threatening the ambition of these initiatives and the “spark” that their intentions and convergence might provide as we face also rising right-wing and particularly anti-immigrant /minority sentiment in Ireland today.