2026-01-20

133. Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh asked the Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport when he will publish the report of Professor Niamh Brennan into governance and culture at the Arts Council; and the timetable for the implementation of the recommendations within that report. [4113/26]

In February 2025, I ordered an external review of the governance and organisational culture in the Arts Council, following the disclosure of a loss on a failed €6.675 million IT project in the Arts Council's annual report for 2023. With the agreement of the Government, I established an expert advisory committee comprising Professor Niamh Brennan, Dr. Margaret Cullen and John McCarthy to deliver the review. The committee has concluded its work and today I brought its review to Government, which approved its publication and it is now publicly available. The committee was fully independent in its approach and has ensured that the review process was robust, fair and transparent, leading to practical, actionable recommendations to improve the Arts Council's governance. The review includes 149 recommendations, as Deputy Ó Snodaigh has said, of which 100 are addressed to the Arts Council. The remainder are to the Department, the Department of public expenditure and reform and other Departments. It includes proposals for legislative changes, on which I intend to revert to Government. As I have mentioned, there are also a number of recommendations directed at my Department and more widely for the Government. It is vital that we put in place structures to prevent future governance failures and I intend to implement in full the recommendations which are addressed to my Department and to the Arts Council. The Department will now engage directly with the interim director and the chair of the Arts Council to ensure that the organisation is supported during this interim period, ahead of what will be a time of significant change. This will be important for the wider arts sector and I want to assure it that the council will continue its day-to-day operation of supporting artists. The Arts Council will have six weeks from today to submit a plan to me that sets out the actions it will take to implement the committee's recommendations, along with timelines for delivery. I have also instructed officials in the Department to establish a monitoring group to measure the Arts Council's progress and to ensure that it delivers on its implementation plan. The recommendations that relate to my Department have been accepted and will be implemented in full, under the oversight of the management board. Progress will be measured through a quarterly report with a view to ensuring that the Department has a robust, comprehensive and effective governance oversight framework in place, not just in respect of the Arts Council but for all of the bodies under our responsibility.

I welcome that there is already a set timetable in terms of the recommendations for the Arts Council and the Minister's Department but the report itself goes beyond the Department and some of it is cross-cutting. The report was commissioned by the Minister and I take the opportunity to thank Professor Brennan and her team for publishing it. It identifies a lot of issues, some of which have already been addressed in the Arts Council and some of which have already been addressed, as far as I know, in the Department. There are substantial issues in terms of the public service as a whole to ensure such debacles do not happen again in smaller public sector bodies. There are recommendations which go beyond the Department. Has the Minister liaised with the Department of public expenditure and reform to ensure the recommendations associated with it will also progress?

Deputy Ó Snodaigh has raised a very important issue. The formulation, compilation and completion of the report was done independently but prior to the conclusion of the report the chapters relating to each individual entity were circulated to those entities for their observations. I did not receive the final report until 5 January and I published it today. I have accepted Professor Brennan's recommendations together with the committee in full and I thank the committee for the work it has done. As they say, it has done the State some service here. There is an opportunity as well for the committee of which Deputy Ó Snodaigh is a member to peruse the report, go through the recommendations and see. I will bring forward a timetable for implementation from the Arts Council which I will take back to the Government. I will have a quarterly review from my management board which I will also report to the Government. There is an awful lot here for other Departments, State bodies and semi-State bodies to examine to see whether there are recommendations that cross over and to see how they could be implemented to improve the operation of these bodies.

One of the key points that jumped out at me, given the context of other failed IT programmes, is that the report emphasised that a multiplicity of public service bodies of a similar scale to the Arts Council should be better supported from within the public sector when it comes to undertaking projects akin to the Arts Council project. There is a challenge there for the Government as a whole. The Minister is not responsible for this but I urge him to use the opportunity at Cabinet, when the report comes up, to remind all Departments that it is public money at the end of the day. There is still an IT issue in the Arts Council. The project collapsed and obviously there is a need to address the grants application system, which was using a defunct system which was held together with Sellotape, I am told. There is also the issue of the directorship. Dr. Moling Ryan is temporarily in the job as an interim director. Is there any word on when the Minister is likely to be able to fill the role permanently?

I think Deputy Ó Snodaigh would agree with me that the Arts Council has gone through a fairly tumultuous period of change in the recent past, and I acknowledge the role that Dr. Moling Ryan has played as an interim director. I have no plans in the immediate future to do any further chopping and changing. I want to leave things bed down and get a genuine schedule and timetable for the change management that is now required to go through. There will also be legislative requirements and Professor Niamh Brennan referred to this also. Deputy Ó Snodaigh and I have discussed possible changes to the existing Arts Act. There will obviously be consultation and engagement with the committee that we will have to do. I do not want to see any other major change. There is a sufficient amount there. On whether the Arts Council will get a new IT system, there is a board and executive and it may be that they may feel it is worthy to come back to the Department and revisit this whole thing from the start. There was a suggestion of an off-the-shelf version that could be acquired. I will consider anything but at the moment the most important thing is that the report is there, the recommendations need to be implemented, there is a schedule of timeframes before the implementation, there is engagement with the committee and there is the Arts Council getting back to the daily business of what it is best at.