The Arts Council is about to enter a world of pain it has never experienced before. Following Wednesday’s revelations about the disastrous information-technology project that it spent almost €7 million on (though it claims it may be able to recoup a small portion of that), the council will now be subject to an external examination at the request of the new Minister for Culture, Patrick O’Donovan.
That investigation will not be restricted to what went wrong with the abandoned IT project, which was originally meant to cost just under €3 million, but will review the entire operations of the organisation. The results will be awaited with interest by many of the council’s clients, some of which it has admonished in the past for inadequate governance. The review will also prompt fears of a threat to the council’s increased State financing in recent years.
The blame game was already under way by Thursday, with sources within the council insisting it had kept the Department of Culture fully informed as its business-transformation programme spun out of control in 2022 and 2023. That implies the information might not have been passed on to Catherine Martin, the minister at the time.
It’s all very reminiscent of the who-told-whom-when ructions between the same minister, her department and RTÉ in the wake of the Ryan Tubridy affair. The facts available so far suggest there’s plenty of blame to go around, and we can expect these questions and many others to be the subject of heated and performative inquisition at Oireachtas committee hearings.
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What we do know already from the initial review the department published on Wednesday is that the Arts Council’s business case for the project did not meet the requirements of the public-spending code and that there was no record of the proposal being brought to the Arts Council board for approval. We also know that the senior manager assigned to the project worked on it part-time alongside their full-time job and there was heavy reliance on external contractors.
According to Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers, the council “frequently changed and extended contracts with certain suppliers, going over the allowed limits for cost increases in several cases”.
A litany of other bad practices and governance failures will be read about with particular interest by Arts Council clients. For the political establishment, though, this is just the latest in a string of examples of the slipshod way in which the State handles public money. There are certainly parallels with previous controversies about egregious cost overruns at the Office of Public Works and the new children’s hospital.
One wonders why the State does not have better processes in place to advise and support a relatively small organisation such as the Arts Council, which clearly lacks the expertise to run even a medium-sized IT project.
But the scandal and ensuing review may also expose to public scrutiny the inner workings of an institution whose decision-making processes are often criticised as opaque. One long-standing Arts Council client, who wishes for understandable reasons to remain anonymous, points to last year’s decision to reduce the arts grants programme, with a knock-on effect on a range of cultural organisations.
“I’d heard from a few people that the cuts may have been linked to a €7 million overspend on an IT system, but I found that hard to believe,” they told me. “That said, I never received a clear answer as to why this programme faced cuts, especially when the Arts Council itself received an overall funding increase from the government.”
Such criticisms are perhaps inevitable for an organisation such as the Arts Council. But there have been recurring complaints from several quarters that some of the decisions it makes are unjustified or unexplained. And the question of how the written-off IT project has affected funding decisions should be at the forefront of any inquiry.
“There’s a growing sense that smaller arts organisations will bear the brunt of the Arts Council’s financial shortfalls,” the client says. “Larger institutions seem too big to fail while smaller groups like ours have little to no lobbying power to influence decisions.
“One of the most perplexing aspects is the decision to reduce funding for the arts-grants funding scheme while increasing investment in strategic funding,” which goes to larger organisations.
“It’s important to acknowledge that there are good people working within the Arts Council. The decision to cut funding likely came from someone in senior management or the board.”
It might be a good idea for the forthcoming examination to seek out these sorts of perspectives.
