After a failed IT project costing €6.675 million and the departure of Director Maureen Kennelly, the Arts Council faces a crisis of trust and direction. What does it mean for those who work in the sector?

It has been a difficult week for the Arts Council. With the stepping down of Maureen Kennelly on Wednesday, it has lost a Director who had a deep understanding of what it is like to work in the arts, and on Thursday, its senior staff and Chair were questioned by the Public Accounts Committee for over three hours regarding the failed IT system that has now cost €6.675 million.

So what did we learn from the hearing? The Chair, Maura McGrath, and the Director outlined three reasons for the debacle: a lack of internal IT expertise, substandard work from the external IT contractors, and Covid-19, which created a difficult work environment and competing priorities. The project – to combine five online systems and create a more streamlined application process – was approved in 2019 with a budget of €3m and began in April 2020. By 2022, already a year behind schedule, the project still had ‘multiple system failures’ and was not delivering. The Council parted ways with the contractors, withholding payments of €200k. Senior staff commissioned a review that said the project could be saved if they kept going with it. Again in spring 2023, with still no delivery, internal advice said it was worth persisting with, but by November the same advice told the Council it would take four more years and several million more to complete it. The Council paused the project. By the summer of 2024, the cost had risen to an astonishing €6.675m, it had used 21 external contractors and consultants, and the Council finally shouted stop.

The result of this misjudgement is a deepening crisis, the end result of which we still do not know. It has not only damaged trust within the arts and among politicians and the public, but it has also given the new Minister for the Arts Patrick O’Donovan the opportunity to start tugging at the arts infrastructure, though we have no clear picture of what he intends. He has started by commissioning a report on the ‘governance and culture’ of the Arts Council, which could mean anything; he has refused a contract renewal for Maureen Kennelly, although the Board wanted to keep her; and he is prevaricating over the extension of the Basic Income for the Arts pilot, despite the fact that the Government parties promised in the election they would continue it. The Arts Council’s IT mistake has contributed to this new situation. It is extremely unfortunate because so many people rely on this organisation; 90% of its 2023 budget of €136m went to artists and arts organisations. 

But why didn’t this IT system deliver? This was not the first large IT project that had caused problems in the Arts Council. Between 2011 and 2018 it created a website and mobile phone app called Culture Fox that was meant to promote cultural events across the country. Maybe not as complicated as combining five online systems, but still a significant project that used up extensive resources and also left the Council with nothing in the end. It was clumsy to use, had little awareness amongst the public, and those in the arts sector dreaded having to add their events using the interface, although it was a requirement of their funding. Culture Fox was abandoned after seven years, but what happened to all of that IT learning within the Council?

The reason Culture Fox failed was because the Council never consulted with those in the arts about what they wanted, and that same insular decision-making is at the root of why this IT system has failed too. If you want a more streamlined process for recording and processing applications and grants, shouldn’t you start by consulting with the people who make the applications?

It was strange yesterday listening to the Arts Council staff bemoan a lack of expertise available to them when they, probably more than any state organisation in the country, have easy access to a community of creative managers, organisations and arts offices with application-management structures. But with the professionalisation of the arts in recent years, there has been a lot more talk of ‘expertise’, ‘processes’, ‘consultants’, ‘reports’, ‘reviews’ and ‘business cases’, and a lot less time for those who simply get things done. It was notable that when the Secretary General of the Department of the Arts, Feargal Ó Coigligh, heard in June 2024 about the financial loss, he simply commissioned another report. It was eight more months before it was published.

There is another question: even if it was delivered upon, why would an online system for grant management cost almost €7m, enough to fund five orchestras? Ireland has become greedy and wasteful, trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the State through speaking the vacant language of managerialism.

It is all far away from the philosophy that informs music and the arts. There is no ‘business case’ for what artists do. It is about values, a philosophy, an in-the-bones belief that if you bring talent and hard work to audiences then something extraordinary happens. They need funding, but Ireland benefits exponentially.

Probably the most difficult thing to listen to yesterday was when the Arts Council talked about needing more resources for its work, that it couldn’t be expected to undertake its workload without more staff and expertise, even though they often ignore that very same argument from artists and arts organisations who are expected to keep everything going on a minimum budget. The Council has almost tripled its staff and yet somehow become disconnected, still in denial about its Dublin bias, and obsessed with bureaucracy to the neglect of its philosophy. Now they have given politicians the opportunity to start chipping away at the arts. They need to start listening again.

Watch the Public Accounts Committee hearing from 29 May here.

Published in the Journal of Music on Friday 30 May 2025. Visit https://journalofmusic.com/opinion/what-now-arts-council