Inclusivity in the Night-Time Economy
Thoughts on this year's conference
In a real turn of events, I’d like to start this post with an apology; sorry for disappearing for a few weeks. I’ve temporarily moved house, so my head has been in a hectic, scrambled state. In situ in Wicklow for the next few months, with no bags to pack, I am back to regular scramblings now.
Part of the scrambling included a panel that I was chairing this week. This Monday just gone, I was very lucky to be part of the Night-Time Economy Conference that was held in Cork city. For those not very familiar, this conference is run by the Arts Council and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, and they call on experts from the arts and culture frontlines to discuss the case for a richer and supported night-time economy in Ireland.
Night-Time Economy Conference
As was said many times on Monday during the two panel discussions, night-time is classified as the times between 6pm and 6am. While most of us are more than content socialise within a portion of those timeframes, there are many reasons why people don’t feel comfortable to go out after 9pm (lack of reliable public transport, general expenses, personal safety/perceived danger, fractured relationships with alcohol or crowds that are drinking) and a number of reasons why arts and cultural venues are suffering as a result of those concerns.
The panel I was chairing was called Learning through Doing: insights and data from late-night events. I was very lucky to have Monica Corcoran (Arts Council), Collette Farrell (Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda), Padraig Naughton (ADI), and Dermot Lambert (producer, Garageland) sharing their experiences of running events in the night-time and the lessons that they’ve learned.
Between them, there was a lot to take in: Monica shared findings from the venue survey that the Arts Council completed last year, Collette laid out what the last year of running a late-night programme was like for her venue, Padraig explained the financial and physical barriers to guaranteeing access with limited resources, and Dermot, who works with children, teens and young adults, spoke about the social benefits - versus financial profits - of looking beyond the traditional opening hours of arts spaces.
On the second panel, how arts and culture positively shapes our neighbourhoods, chaired by Robbie Kitt, we heard how Nat Mac (Electronic Music Council), Megs Morley (Galway City Arts Centre), Mark Davies (Night-Time Economy Adviser, Drogheda) and Dafe Orugbo (artist, general legend) took different approaches to engaging their communities with the arts even further. Whether they’ve lived a life that is always immersed in culture, or they’re someone who wants to know more, these panellists captured the vibrancy of life that goes with embracing arts at a local level.
Even though my panel had a focus on inclusivity, the other panel touched heavily on it, because for whatever reasons, a percentage of people have a general hesitancy to this night-time conversation. While some of it comes from a concerned place of safety, it also comes from a place where you don’t feel you don’t belong in this discussion. You don’t go out late, you don’t like clubs, you can’t find a babysitter… these barriers could be lessened if we had a more inviting night life on offer, one that meant you could go out and come home easily, where pubs or clubs weren’t the only places to gather in groups, and if there were more family-friendly options after 6pm.
An interesting point that was mentioned by Mark Davies was that this time of night is when we let our hair down, and that point struck me as personally untrue as I don’t find socialising at night-time relaxing due to the access issues that I encounter throughout a typical evening or night out. And perhaps that’s an easier way to make sense of it all. If this is a time when we are meant to claim back as ours, one that puts pause to our work day and pressed play on our free time, what can we do to make sure that you are at ease?
Challenges and solutions
Outside of going to the cinema, gigs or dinner, I rarely go out now at night to socialise, so my experience of The Night is working as a DJ. I regularly play in the Grand Social, and the things that make life easier in and around this venue for me are:
I drive in and out, avoiding the crush of late night buses, especially at the weekends. I live on a 24-hour route and as HANDY as that is, it’s the only bus serving the wide breadth of my area, so the buses are mobbed from 10pm onwards Thursday through to Sunday. If I didn’t drive, I’d be in a real pickle.
A couple of cafés close by are open late, which means I can buy a nice coffee at 10/10:30pm (and sometimes a gelato), instead of just drinking cokes to get me through the night.
The venue manager has started walking me to my car at night. The bad vibes in town have been escalating so much this year that if he had offered to walk me to my car last year, I would have said no. I’m so grateful for it now.
This venue is not wheelchair accessible, but the staff go above and beyond to make me feel comfortable. Helping me wherever possible and creating a very caring environment within the confines of a physically restrictive place. Their attitude makes me feel at ease. This is a stark, stark contrast to an experience I had lately where an organisation wanted to halve my fee so they could provide me access support.
The nights that I play are usually aimed at young people who love pop music. This makes for a very adoring and enthusiastic crowd, one that I’m not guaranteed at other nights and other venues.
Each of those points of positivity all had a challenge that was overcome either by the can-do attitude of the venue and staff, or by amenities in the surrounding area, and this is how I think we are going to have to enter discussions around NTE. We have to accept that there are existing problems, but we have to work on providing solutions rather than shutting the whole thing down.
Money, money, money
We are coming to the end of the first pilot year of late night programming, and in 2025, we will come to the end of the three-year Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, so a lot of big decisions around financial support for arts venues and artists will be made soon. When purse strings are being opened and pulled taut, I think it’s vital that access costs for venues and touring productions are taken care of by whatever wave of grant packages come next.
These grants should cover building renovations and access adaptations, the day and night rates for ISL interpreters and captioners, and day-to-day access supports for disabled staff and guests.
In terms of access and disability, there are many reasons to feel excluded from the NTE, and I have been trying very hard to figure out existing ways that can open up communities to disabled artists and disabled culture lovers. One that I keep coming back to, and am slightly perplexed by, is the Work and Access Programme.
Every bar, restaurant, cinema, club, theatre, gallery, rehearsal space, and so on, is a workplace, and each of these places should be able to employ staff with or without disabilities. If they can’t, this programme can assess the areas in which they lack, and provide financial support to create a suitable working environment for the disabled staff member.
This programme has funds to cover communication support, in-work support, personal readers, work equipment, workplace adaptation support, Disability, Equality and Inclusion training, so what’s suitable for a disabled staff member, would extend to the needs of disabled guests.
When I think of the venues I play in, or the venues I want to play in, the issues I encounters are stairs, tight spaces, and inaccessible bathrooms. This programme covers those issues, but because I’m self-employed, I can only apply to this programme if I have contractual agreements with venues or festivals. Unfortunately, the nature of freelancing is that you don’t always have things locked down to a contract, so this Work and Access Programme does not work for my access needs, even though bad access prevents me from working to my full abilities.
The existence of this programme proves that it’s not an impossible dream to have additional financial support for venues wanting to be more inclusive from the government.
Where next?
Conferences like this one are always very affirming when you hear directly from the people working to make improvements, but there has been so much talking happening, that it feels like we need to move towards a more active stage of NTE.
The support and enthusiasm from the Arts Council and the Department was so palpable in that room, and in the lead up to the event too, that it’s very hard to dismiss it as just a “more talk and no action” move.
As we learned from the panellists, the move towards a more open NTE is a cultural shift, one that takes time to redirect and is impossible to capture in stats and figures. A year of pilot schemes isn’t enough to change that, but the benefits, according to those who have been running them, are beginning to reveal themselves, and we have to learn to value community-based social benefits above expected profit margins.