The news that the Arts Council has lost €5.3m (confirmed figure) on an IT system that was unfit for purpose has caused understandable concern among the general public and anxiety within the arts sector. This is a serious matter which requires investigation and accountability, but also perspective and measured responses, particularly from artists through their representative associations.

The widely reported debacle has left artists worried that the cost of fixing the situation may be met by reductions in the Arts Council’s overall allocation from Government, leading to reduced grant levels for an already cash-strapped sector: in short a worry that artists will ultimately pay for errors not of their making. This is hardly surprising. Few sectors were more unfairly punished in the 2008-2013 period for the catastrophic errors and corruption of the then government, the banks and builders, than the arts. This is a rather different situation, however.

The Arts Council has given strong reassurances to the National Campaign for the Arts that whatever the outcome of the current investigations, grant supports will not be affected. Some may ask if it is within their gift to make such assurances since their Government paymasters might punish the agency to a degree that will leave the Council’s hands tied. But it bespeaks a reassuring determination, and one which should remind artists that for all its inherent flaws, moments of human error and its own impossible financial situation, the Arts Council was always and remains committed to support for the arts and the rights in principle of artists to fair livelihoods.

Since the precise nature of the failings are now a matter of formal investigation, it is unhelpful prematurely to leap to judgement or apportion blame here. The new Arts Minister and the Minister for Public Expenditure were quick to suggest that the Arts Council’s actions “likely” breached public procurement rules. Time and independent audits will tell.

What is clear is that the moneys being paid out by State bodies generally to private sector IT companies is exorbitant. In the same week that the Arts Council story broke, a parliamentary question brought to light the fact that the Department of Social Protection in the same period was paying €5.6 million PER MONTH to IT contractors! One Netherlands-based company alone is reported to have been paid a total of €48m of Irish taxpayer’s money over two years. This company reported a pre-tax profit of €8m in 2023. At least those costly Social Protection systems appear to be functioning. But this disclsure of the scale and cost of State dependence on the commercial IT sector helps put the level of the Arts Council’s wasted expenditure into some kind of perspective.

While our gaze is naturally turned on the public servants within the Arts Council and the Department of Arts and Culture who watched this money slip between their fingers, nobody seems to have asked how such highly paid IT wizards managed to misread so badly the needs of a relatively small Irish state agency and take them for such a ride over four years, failing, by all accounts time and again, to provide the service they promised to deliver. Will the enquiry include an option to blacklist such companies from future tendering, should incompetence or deliberate spinning out be uncovered?

As to how the Arts Council loss impacts upon artists, the very mention of a €5.3m loss causes natural anger and trauma. That kind of money could have funded an awful lot of arts projects. It rings dreadful in an underfunded sector. But as against that, these moneys were never intended for artists supports; rather to improve systems of assessing grant applications, as well as other internal corporate needs.  And as the DSP statistics (and the ongoing Children’s Hospital overspend of 1.5 billion euro) reminds us, the sum involved is not ultimately a catastrophic loss to the State coffers. It should not have happened, it must be rectified and persons help accountable, but correcting it will not send the economy into a tailspin in the way that the bank guarantees and bailouts of fifteen years ago did.

Let the matter, therefore, be cleared up and let us hope that the crisis might cause renewed examination of the real problem alluded to above: the precarious position of artists and arts workers in Ireland.

WATCH HERE FOR A SECOND ESSAY LATER THIS WEEK, LOOKING AT CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS TO “THE REAL PROBLEM: THE PRECARIOUS POSITION OF ARTISTS AND ARTS WORKERS IN IRELAND“