The recommendations in a “fairly stark” review into governance and management at the Arts Council will be accepted “in their entirety,” the Minister for Culture has said.
Patrick O’Donovan is expected to bring the report to Cabinet within the next two weeks.
The review into the culture at the Arts Council was ordered by Mr O’Donovan’s department in the wake of a botched IT project which cost €6.7 million and had to be abandoned.
The new IT system for processing and managing grant applications, originally commissioned in 2018, had been expected to cost €3 million and take 2½ years to complete.
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The Arts Council was forced to write off €5.3 million spent on the project.
The review, which was compiled by an expert advisory group chaired by Prof Niamh Brennan, said the Arts Council needs a “fit-for-purpose board” with skills in governance, human resources and law – and “not just knowledge of the arts”.
The review said the Arts Council’s business case for the project understated the costs and did not include VAT or the expense of streamlining businesses.
“I’ve read it. It’s fairly stark in its findings, and it’s fairly clear in its recommendations, and I hope to bring it to Government either next week or the week after,” Mr O’Donovan said on Tuesday.
He said he would be committing to the report’s 149 recommendations for reform of the Arts Council “in their entirety”.
“Without getting into the report, there is sufficiently enough material already in the media to say that it will be a fundamentally different Arts Council – it has to be,” he said.
“We have to restore the public’s confidence in the organisation and we also have to make sure that people who have up to now felt excluded for one reason or another from their artistic output need to be included.”
He said this would need to include the new Irish community and art forms such as comedy.
