Arts Council's botched €6.5m IT project leaves 'accountability' issues still unresolved

The report calls for the development of 'stronger oversight mechanisms for funded bodies' to ensure issues such as the IT project are 'identified early and escalated appropriately'. Picture: Leah Farrell/ RollingNews.ie

Persistent weaknesses in governance, which led to the cancellation of an IT project at the Arts Council, leading to a  €6.5m loss to the taxpayer, still need to be addressed, a new report has said.

The Dáil Public Accounts Committee’s review of the spending debacle, which saw a project to install a single IT interface for the Arts Council pulled before it was delivered in 2022, noted problems with “governance, performance measurement and accountability” remain unresolved in the aftermath of the project collapse.

The newly-published report calls for the development of “stronger oversight mechanisms for funded bodies” to ensure issues such as the IT project are “identified early and escalated appropriately”.

It recommends that all financial statements for State agencies be filed in a timely manner in order to “maintain transparency and accountability”, noting the Arts Council’s 2023 statements were not laid before the Oireachtas at the same time as they were presented to the Department of Arts and Culture in July 2024.

The report further calls for “enhanced governance and approval procedures” to be implemented with regard to capital expenditure to ensure they “deliver clear value for money within all departments and agencies”, and recommends the council itself report back to the PAC regarding the progress of those new procedures.

The Arts Council — the State agency with responsibility for funding and developing the arts within Ireland — is almost exclusively funded by the State, and was in receipt of just under €134m worth of taxpayer funding in 2023.

The issue with the aborted IT project emerged during the tenure of the last government, while the council was under the remit of former arts minister Catherine Martin.

The original budget for the IT system was some €3m. 

By the time the project was pulled, the total loss to the taxpayer was estimated at €5.3m, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General, with €1.2m considered to still be of use in a new replacement system.

Last May, the council’s chair Maura McGrath — who was appointed in June 2024 — argued at PAC that small specialist State bodies like the Arts Council should not be expected to manage their own “complex IT projects”.

In the organisation’s recently published annual report for 2024, Ms McGrath expressed her “deep concern” at the non-delivery of the council’s business transformation programme, and the associated write-down of €5.3m in its 2023 accounts.

“I was not expecting to be dealing with this when I took up my position,” she said, adding whatever measures and reforms were required at the council “will be rigorously pursued by me”.