Arts Council needs to be ‘fundamentally different’ to win back trust – minister

By Gráinne Ní Aodha, Press Association

The Arts Council will need to be “fundamentally different” to win back public trust, minister Patrick O’Donovan has said.

An external review of the governance and organisational culture in the Arts Council was announced in February last year by Mr O’Donovan.

It came after the state agency made the headlines over a botched IT project, which had aimed to amalgamate five old systems into one at a cost of €3 million.

The project was abandoned in 2024 after costing €6.7 million.

The Arts, Sport, and Media Minister said he would bring the report by the expert advisory committee, led by Professor Niamh Brennan, to Cabinet in the next fortnight.

Mr O’Donovan said the report’s findings were “fairly stark” and said the Government would follow through on the recommendations “in their entirety”.

“Without getting into the report, there is enough material in the media to say that it will be a fundamentally different Arts Council.

“It has to be.

“We have to restore the public’s confidence in the organisation and we also have to make sure that people who felt excluded for one reason or another from their artistic output need to be included, whether they are people who are new Irish or people who are Irish whose arts form is comedy or whatever, hasn’t been included up until now.

“There can’t be a method, going forward, where we exclude some to the detriment of others.”

Mr O’Donovan said the first report carried out on this issue was ordered by him and his department.

He said the public needed to see value for money and have trust in the system.

The minister called for local authorities to come under the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General.

He said: “There is one particular gap in the Comptroller and Auditor General system and in the public accounts system, which I have been saying for years – it’s the local authority system.

“The local authorities get clean bills of health through the local government auditor – that’s actually not a financial possibility, that is not financially possible that every single local authority gets a 100 per cent clean bill of health.”

Asked about the cost of stamps, Mr O’Donovan said that it was still good value to send a letter in Ireland.

An Post announced on Monday that the price of a stamp would increase to €1.85.

The minister said: “It is still very good value for money I would say that you can get a letter delivered anywhere in this country for less than €2.

“Yes it is an increase, but we need to retain the service.

“It’s a really important service in terms of its connectivity to people right across the country and Ireland’s postal delivery service for letters is still among the cheapest in Europe.”