ITMA was awarded €1 million in Shared Island Arts Investment funding Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Tánaiste Micheál Martin, and Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin announced Tuesday, 26 September.

ITMA was one of five projects selected for funding, with a total allocation of €7.4 million from the government’s Shared Island Fund. The projects were brought forward by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and approved by Government in July 2022, subject to finalisation of each project proposal. The five projects will be delivered by Arts partners, North and South, to provide new facilities and opportunity for artistic exchange, curation, and audience engagement across the island.

The €1 million in funding going to ITMA will be used to develop a new residential studio space and enhance digitisation capacity to promote all-island Artist and Archivist collaborations.

ITMA will restore the OPW’s two-bedroom mews at the rear of the Archive on Merrion Square to establish an artist/archivist-in-residence site. Along with this, ITMA will use the funding to further develop digitisation capacity for all-island and international artist/archivist collaborations.

Said ITMA Director Liam O’Connor of Tuesday’s announcement:

This Shared Island funding will see the Irish Traditional Music Archive become an archival and creative hub for a diverse range of artists, archivists and community representatives. It will connect local communities with ITMA’s national collection while also benefiting a growing international online audience.

Building residence studio spaces will create new opportunities for artists and archivists from Northern Ireland and border counties to more easily engage with ITMA’s existing collections. It will enable better access to new state-of-the art digitisation resources, which can be shared with volunteers and community groups, and benefit smaller regional archives. By investing in ITMA’s digital infrastructure, the Government of Ireland are paving the way for new research into—and a better understanding of—our shared music, song and dance traditions. Enhancing ITMA’s digitisation and archiving capabilities will enable researchers and artists to bring cultural archival materials to ITMA for digitisation and return the files to their local communities. Artists will spend creative time with ITMA’s archival collections to create new works inspired by our shared cultural inheritance.

ITMA believes in celebrating the diversity of traditions within our shared traditional music culture and are excited about playing a special role in raising awareness of the centuries-old processes with melodies, songs and dances moving North, South, East and West bridging all social, political or physical barriers. ITMA aims to be a living archive serving a living tradition, and this funding heralds an important milestone in our development as custodians of the largest collection of its type in the world.

 

Said ITMA Board Chair Áine Hensey:

This announcement from the Shared Island Funds is great news indeed for ITMA and it will support our ambitious development plans for the organisation. The significant enhancement of our digitisation capacity will help to ensure that at-risk material can be safely preserved, catalogued and made available to the music community. The development of the mews as a self-contained studio space for artists, archivists and researchers will provide a much-needed facility in the capital.

This project would not be possible without the cooperation and support of many stakeholders. ITMA would like to especially thank and acknowledge The Department of An Taoiseach and The Shared Island Unit, The Arts Council, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Minister Catherine Martin and The Department TCAGSM and The Office of Public Works. Read the government’s full announcement here.