The Arts Council has appointed former former Edinburgh Festival Fringe organiser Shona McCarthy as its new director.
The council said McCarthy was appointed with the consent of Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan.
A native of Ballycran in Co Down, McCarthy will take up her role in the coming weeks.
She is chair of the International Fund for Ireland and a member of the expert panel on the UK City of Culture programme.
RM Block
McCarthy served as chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society from 2015 until last year.
In a statement, the council said she “brings a wealth of senior leadership experience, as well as a deep knowledge of the arts sector both in Ireland and internationally”.
It comes after almost 18 months of turmoil at the agency after it revealed in February 2025 that it had spent €6.7 million on a defunct IT project. The failure of the project led to major political and public backlash, as well as clashes with O’Donovan, who commissioned an independent review to scrutinise governance and culture within the council.
The council’s former director Maureen Kennelly left the organisation last year after O’Donovan refused to sign off on her request for a second five-year term in charge, with management consultant Moling Ryan stepping in as interim executive director.
Over recent years, State funding of the council grew considerably, increasing from €80 million in 2020 to €134 million in 2024, while staff numbers more than tripled between 2018 and 2024. The expert review said there was “unplanned rapid growth” in staff and budget that coincided with the start of the IT project, which “would have put Arts Council staff under considerable pressure to cope with the expansion, contributing to an unstable environment”.
McCarthy faces the task of rallying morale at the Arts Council as well as presiding over a budget of more than €100 million and the disbursal of thousands of grants to artists all over the country.
The expert report spoke of “strained” relations between senior staff at the Arts Council, with staff telling the review of “factions” and “embarrassing behaviour” by some senior managers in front of other staff and third parties. It found there was a lack of a shared vision about the new IT system, which was supposed to replace an obsolete platform used for processing millions of euro worth of grants to artists. The older system remained in use after the collapse of the project.
