DECLAN BALE,
Sir, - Your Environment Editor, Frank McDonald (Weekend, January 10th), praised the new Millennium Wing of the National Gallery as being "breathtaking, visionary and sophisticated" and then concluded his article by writing that "the only scandalous aspect is that the Government put so little into it - a miserly €3.17 million, most of which it got back in VAT and PAYE receipts".
This statement is inaccurate.
I have been asked by Síle de Valera TD, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, to clarify the funding of the new wing.
The total cost is about €33 million, as reported correctly by Mary Minihan in your news columns of last Saturday, not €25.39 million as reported in the Weekend supplement on the same day. The breakdown is as follows.
The National Gallery Foundation raised about €7.6 million through the private sector. The State allocated about €9.5 million from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the EU operational programme for tourism. This is public money that the State could have allocated to any other project that satisfied the cultural tourism criteria of the Cultural Development Incentives Scheme (CDIS), which came under the jurisdiction of the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. The National Gallery of Ireland contributed about €5 million from its own resources.
Exchequer funding will be in the region of €11 million. The public funding element of the costs (including ERDF funding) associated with the Millennium Wing, combined with the Gallery's own resources of about €5 million, accounts for close to 80 per cent of the total cost.
In addition, the Department has allocated significant funds towards the costs of bringing of the exhibition "Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape" to Ireland for the inauguration of the Millennium Wing.- Yours, etc.,
DECLAN BALE, Press Officer, Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Mespil Road, Dublin 4.