Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 25 November 2021

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 33 - Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
Chapter 7 - Oversight of Funding for the European Capital of Culture 2020

9:30 am

Ms Katherine Licken:

Yes. I ask the Deputy to bear with me for a moment. Obviously, we had to update the risk register in respect of Covid-19, because it did not just affect this Department in terms of everybody having to work online, it affected us deeply in terms of how we had to pivot our focus on our work to support the sectors. As I said in my opening remarks, we are very much an audience-facing Department, one that is about people, that is, people congregating, socialising and playing sport. We had to re-evaluate all our work programmes and we have taken on board some areas, for example, in the live entertainment sector, dealing with stakeholders that we never dealt with before because they were out in the commercial market making money and they did not need recourse to the State. We updated all our risk registers to take account of Covid-19. We set up a specific Covid unit in the Department. Those positions are in place a long time and the team is still working flat out, engaging with the stakeholders, and designing programmes.

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