The Three Sisters 2020 Culture Cabin has been in situ at major festivals across Waterford, Kilkenny and Wexford in recent months.
The ‘Three Sisters 2020’ Bid Book for the status of European Capital of Culture is due to be submitted by Friday of this week, October 16th, with interviews with the selection panel scheduled to be held on November 12th and 13th.
And should the campaign be short listed for the prize come the end of next month, a member of the bid team confirmed that the campaign will take on an “all guns blazing” approach in terms of public engagements come January and February.
Speaking at the Piltown District Meeting of Kilkenny County Council held in Ferrybank last Wednesday, bid member Catherine Collins (Waterford) said that the team, which also includes Cornelia McCarthy (Kilkenny) and Michael D’Arcy (Wexford), had been working diligently over the past year.
“The Bid Book is the culmination of a year’s activity, starting from last October, which has built up steadily over the past 12 months and we’re currently in the final stages of preparing the book, which is effectively an 80-page application form,” said Ms Collins, whose regular line of work is with the Waterford Library Service.
“So there are questions set out by Europe and we answer them to the best of our ability via the Bid Book via lots of images, statistics and lots of other interesting information.
“We kicked all of this off through a feasibility study which was conducted in the middle of 2014 to see what would be the best way to approach a bid for the European Capital of Culture, always with a regional dimension, embracing the concept of working together across traditional geographic boundaries.
“The Capital of Culture concept was seen as a great tool through which to facilitate such an approach, so the idea of the three counties coming together like this was soon identified as the model through which we would build a bid.”
Ms Collins said that huge tourism benefits would come as a result of a successful bid, while one of its chief by-products would be its “legacy effect,” with the bid team also being asked to outline the legacy that such a gain would have for the region over the next 10 to 15 years.
“It would clearly help to build up the regional economy and help cultural operators to come together and create a much more cohesive cultural strategy for the region,” she added.
Public engagement is critical to the bid’s success, with three public consultations held back in April leading to the creation of the ‘Three Sisters’ moniker, logo and branding, as part of boosting the bid’s regional concept.
Embracing food, sport along with traditional arts, the bid team has erected a pop-up ‘Culture Cabin’ at a range of events in Waterford, Kilkenny and Wexford in recent months, all of which is detailed in the six-chapter Bid Book.
Each of these headings (Contribution to long term strategy; European Dimension; Cultural & Artistic Content; Capacity to deliver; Outreach [engagement] and Management) is weighted and marked equally in what Ms Collins described as “a very technical process”.
The three key themes identified in the bid book centre on the non-metropolitan dimension of the south east, co-operation and arrivals.
Ms Collins explained: “We’re a rural region; we’re not based around one large city, so we’re very much about our cities, towns and villages and the culture that surrounds all three. We also looked at the idea of co-operation, namely the GAA, the ICA and the Co-operative movement and how we have historically worked in partnership and that we can continue working in partnership with Europe through culture.
“And by arrivals, we’re referring to the influences of the Vikings and Normans in a historical context, to the more recent influences created by the Polish and Nigerian communities and other nationalities, and, in time, those coming from Syria in terms of the skills and new knowledge that they’ve brought into the region, be it through the gold and jewellery business in Kilkenny or through glass making in Waterford (via the Czechs, Havel and Bacik).”
The bid team has to assure the adjudicators that it can deliver on this project, with the support of the three local authorities and third level institutes and regional businesses forming the bedrock of the application.
The bid team (in competition with Dublin, Limerick and Galway) will face a 10-strong panel of adjudicators in Dublin next month, during which a half hour of presentation will be followed by an hour of questioning. Ms Collins told the meeting that she believes two of the four bids will be short listed come July next.
Said Cllr Tomás Breathnach (Lab): “To use a rugby analogy, this is like a scrum, with a lot of components required to lock together to push in the right direction. We need a range of stakeholders in all three counties crouched in this particular scrum, fully engaged, to give this the most powerful push that we can muster.”
