!['There are questions too for former [Arts Council] chair Kevin Rafter, who was in situ for most of the relevant period, and for senior management including council director Maureen Kennelly [above], who was appointed in March 2020.' Photograph: Nick Bradshaw](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/3FXDAX4YL532Z6WWK3NYVW5H2U.jpg?auth=477d5235b1c2da4cfca3af2bbaa168ea8f413af4acca17a6d7150a981183dd7e&smart=true&width=1024&height=576)
Talk to any creative artist or arts organisation in the country who has applied for Arts Council funding and they will roll their eyes at the cumbersome, outdated and time-consuming online application system which they are required to use when seeking a grant. Many say it requires additional weeks of work every year to navigate.
So it should have been good news when the council, the State’s primary agency for supporting artists and the arts, embarked on building a new IT framework to process funding applications which can range from small grants for one-off projects to multiannual funding for institutions such as the Abbey Theatre or Irish National Opera.
It will take some time – and at least one external review – to determine how that project went so appallingly wrong, but we do now have some detail from the council itself, and from new Minister for Arts Patrick O’Donovan.
In May 2020, the council commenced a project to develop a new grants management system to integrate five existing business systems into one, with a delivery date of the end of 2021. In the summer of 2024, it decided to terminate the project, and to purchase an off-the-shelf grants system instead. What happened over the course of those four years will be the subject of investigation but it seems clear that, to put it mildly, best procurement practice was not followed.
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By the time the project was abandoned, the original budget of €2.97 million had ballooned to €6.5 million. In the annual report it belatedly published on Wednesday, the council says part of the work, worth €1.2 million, is “reusable in the implementation of an off-the-shelf system”. The rest has been written off at a cost of €5.3 million.
How did this happen? O’Donovan, who was appointed Minister just three weeks ago, cites an examination carried out by the secretary general of his department which has found the council “was not prepared for the scale of the project and did not put in place adequate resources to deliver it”. It also found that the oversight, monitoring and reporting arrangements by the department itself over the lifespan of the project were “inadequate”.
That raises a number of questions, first about the role played by O’Donovan’s predecessor, Catherine Martin. Under her watch, between 2020 and 2024, the Arts Council’s annual budget increased by an unprecedented 75 per cent, to €140 million. That made her very popular with the arts sector and will be seen as her legacy achievement. It contrasted with her less successful handling of the governance crisis at RTÉ, when she was generally seen as ineffectual and which culminated in the contentious departure of RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh.
[ Arts Council mothballs multimillion overhaul of ICT systems after years of delaysOpens in new window ]
Public-service media and funding of the arts are both supposed to operate under an arm’s-length principle from government to ensure no political interference. But Martin’s department had responsibility for good governance and financial stability at the Arts Council. By its own admission, it failed on both counts.
There are questions too for former council chair Kevin Rafter, who was in situ for most of the relevant period, and for senior management including council director Maureen Kennelly, who was appointed in March 2020.
The external review of governance and culture at the council, which employed 111 staff in 2023, will cover all its activities and expenditures. While there will be concern in the arts sector about what the outcome of all that will be, there will also be some schadenfreude among applicants who felt that they were held to high standards of governance in their Arts Council applications that the council itself conspicuously failed to meet.
