LAST YEAR, in the middle of the InvernessHighland 2008 bid, one of the Highland’s major arts festival quietly died. The Northlands Festival had survived for well over a decade in Caithness, but eventually collapsed over the issue of funding.

The Highland Festival is now potentially facing a similar crisis. Highland Council is one of the three main institutional funders which support the festival, along with the Scottish Arts Council and Highlands and Islands Enterprise. Some members of the council have long been uneasy about the festival’s increasing focus on Inverness and its surrounding area, and those rumblings now threaten to become a revolt.

A recommendation that the Highland Festival’s grant be removed and used to foster small local events has gained support within the council. Councillor Neil Clark of Lochaber declared that “I cannot defend pretending it’s a Highland Festival when it’s not.”

A decision has been deferred until November at the urging of Councillor Jean Urquhart, who runs the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool. Her argument that more consultation was needed before any such potentially fatal (to the Highland Festival) decision was taken prevailed.

Alastair McDonald, the director of the festival, has argued that the focus on ‘Inverness and its environs’ is the only structure which makes financial sense, and the only way to make the event feel like a genuine festival.

He insists that the work of his regionally-based team of ACE (Arts in the Community Enablers) and touring enterprises like this year’s production of Seven Hunters and the Clan exhibition already maintains the festival’s profile around the Highlands and Islands, while his ACE workers are involved in establishing and running local festivals in any case.

The InvernessHighland2008 Capital of Culture Bid document

The downgrading or disappearance of the Highland Festival would leave the Highlands with no major arts festival other than the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. Small local events, while entirely admirable, would not attract any degree of national or international attention. Nor would such festivals be able to attract the kind of commercial sponsorship that the Highland Festival has been conspicuously successful in doing, or mount ambitious productions and projects.

The modest amount of money which the Highland Council gives to the Highland Festival would not go far in setting up such new events in any case. It is, however, a keystone of the Highland Festival’s financial structure, and its removal would effectively cripple – and probably bring down – the Festival.

Perhaps the argument the Council needs to address should not be whether to reallocate the existing funds elsewhere, but how to increase those funds to a level which would allow the festival to develop and expand, including taking more work to the rest of the Region.

The Highland Festival does have questions relating to its scope and content that need to be addressed in coming years, and it is easy to understand the resentment from Lochaber or the Islands or Caithness when the festival is increasingly perceived as an Inverness rather than a Highland event. Like it or not, however, Inverness is the Highland capital, and as such is an inevitable focal point.

Killing off the Highland Festival is not the answer. Surely what is needed is to seek ways to develop both a healthy and decently funded Highland Festival, even if it has to be focused on Inverness, and simultaneously encourage the continuing development of an equally healthy network of local arts activity hand in hand with it, whether through the festival itself, in cooperation with it (as currently happens), or independently of it.

The removal of support from the Highland Festival in favour of funding small local events will be perceived beyond the Highlands as a return to divisive, parochial ways. With a Highland Year of Culture being planned for 2007, is that really the kind of message we want to send to the rest of Scotland, and well beyond?

These are important issues, and need to be fully debated and rationally appraised, both within the Council and beyond it. Please use our Discussion Forum to let us know what you think.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor
September 2003