Allied Irish Bank Owes Us Its Art

AIB’s terrific art collection of art should be handed over to the people of Ireland as a very small and very humble gesture of apology for the bank’s fecklessness, writes Fintan O'Toole for The Irish Times. Since we are impoverishing ourselves, our children and perhaps our grandchildren to bail out the bankers, we may as well get something back. In the case of Allied Irish Bank, which has behaved with contempt for the law and the public for decades, one of the things we should take back is its terrific collection of Irish art. AIB has what is surely the finest collection of 20th century Irish painting in private hands, and one that in some respects rivals the holdings of public institutions. We’ve already paid for it many times over, so we should at least be able to enjoy it. Indeed, if AIB had managed money half as well as it has collected art, we probably wouldn’t be facing another bill of €7.5 billion for its fecklessness and recklessness. The bank adopted, as early as 1980, a coherent and farsighted approach to buying art. At a time when Irish work was still hugely undervalued (both in monetary and in aesthetic terms), AIB took the bold decision that, instead of just accumulating stuff higgledy-piggledy to cover the walls of its new corporate headquarters, it would try to do one thing right. That one thing was to represent the entire history of Irish modernism, roughly from 1890 to the present. In largely fulfilling that ambition, the bank has ended up with something of genuine importance. There may be duds among the 3,000-odd pieces, but if the artworks were loans, the ratio of performing to non-performing assets would be such that there would be no need for an artistic version of Nama. A repository of works could be established, allowing paintings to circulate or responsible groups to borrow particular works for exhibitions, discussions or other events. The living artists whose work makes up the bulk of the collection would surely feel far more honoured to have that work bring a little joy to benighted citizens than hanging in a boardroom where so much harm has been done. For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art