Legal spending on botched Arts Council IT system almost double what was previously reported
Legal spending in relation to a €6.6m botched Arts Council IT project is now almost double the €60,000 figure previously provided, it has been revealed.The department of culture’s secretary general, Fearghal Ó Coigligh, said his officials were "taken aback" when the Arts Council provided the updated spending figure last Friday, adding that they had asked the body to "correct the record".The Oireachtas Arts Committee has heard that when Vat and liabilities incurred are taken into account, legal spending to recoup funds from four companies involved in the controversial project now stands at €119,000.Issues with the abandoned IT project first came to light in February, with the plan originally expected to cost in the region of €3m for a bespoke grant application system. However, the project ballooned in costs and eventually cost the State €6.6m before it was cancelled.The department then asked the Arts Council to halt all legal actions until an independent review is completed in the autumn.When senator Garrett Ahern suggested to Mr Ó Coighligh that the Arts Council "did not give you the full information" adding that "they have a tendency to mislead...or not give the full information", the senior civil servant suggested that it "points to a cultural issue" within the organisation.Mr Ó Coigligh admitted that his officials should have "stepped in earlier" to manage a failed ICT project that was eventually abandoned.He claimed that the department had perhaps been "overly supportive and not challenging enough", by significantly increasing funding and staffing levels to the Arts Council adding "there's an issue of how that was managed".The committee recently received almost 60 pieces of correspondence, which showed that the Arts Council had alerted the department to concerns around the IT project as far back as 2021. Mr Ó Coighligh said: "In fairness to the Arts Council in relation to the expenditure, they did inform the department when the expenditure decisions were made, they should have sought the department's consent and as a corollary, the department should have demanded that they seek our consent.
These issues were not escalated within the department to a high enough level.
Committee chair Alan Kelly asked: "How can you explain how this wasn't escalated up in your department?"Responding, Mr Ó Coighligh said there was "capture" and officials repeatedly allowed extra funds to be allocated because "people thought 'well one more push and it will be delivered' because there was the horror that it might fail having spent €3m or €3.5m.Social Democrats TD Sinead Gibney pressed Mr Ó Coighligh around the fact that the Arts Council had sought a senior IT person "who could have helped avoid all of this," but that was rejected."I know from experience how frustrating and how difficult it is as a state agency when you repeatedly seek sanction for, and you put forward a business case for all sorts of resources, and all sorts of human resources as well as everything else, and you get knocked back again and again. It's very much a kind of 'computer says no' type response," she said.Mr O'Coighligh said the Arts Council had "an ambition" to recruit a person "at a higher level" than was ultimately sanctioned but said "those are the rules that we have to abide by, frustrating as all as they are".Separately, Mr Ó Coigligh confirmed that the department has written to seek advice from the Data Protection Commission about "an incident that could have amounted to a data breach".He said this related to "one particular incident" and Mr Ó Coigligh has written to the council seeking a report.
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