Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 29 March 2018

Public Accounts Committee

2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 15 - Galway Art House Cinema
Vote 33 - Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs

9:00 am

Ms Katherine Licken:

Go raibh míle maith agat. Déanfaidh mé mo dhícheall le mo chuid Gaeilge Chonamara freisin. Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil libh as an deis a thabhairt dom an ráiteas seo a dhéanamh inniu. Gabhaim buíochas freisin le hOifig an Ard-Reachtaire Cuntas agus Ciste as an mbealach proifisiúnta a rinne a cuid oifigeach an obair a bhí riachtanach i ndáil leis an gcuntas sin. I am very pleased to have this opportunity to address the committee at what I believe is a very significant period in time for the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

The recently announced Project Ireland 2040 sets out a roadmap for delivering on key strategic outcomes for the country, including strengthening rural economies and communities, and enhancing amenity and heritage in both urban and rural settings. The Department will play a critical role in delivering on these strategic outcomes.

As part of Project Ireland 2040, the National Development Plan provides for significant and much-needed investment in our cultural infrastructure throughout the country making sure that opportunities to participate in arts and culture are available wherever one lives, not just in the cities. It is also clear on our responsibility to protect our built and natural heritage and to enhance our visitor facilities so that more people from Ireland and abroad can experience our unique heritage tourism assets.

The sectors the Department represents are diverse and far reaching, and it is vital that we ensure the investment will be spread across all three of the Department’s divisions - culture, heritage and Gaeltacht - so that all of the Department’s stakeholders will see investment in their area over the lifetime of the plan.

The significant scale of the investment proposed over the ten years – approximately €1.2 billion – means that it is critical that the Department develop the required capacity to deliver on the full extent of the proposed investment in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, delivering for our stakeholders across society while at the same time ensuring value for money for the Irish taxpayer. All of the proposed investment will be underpinned by robust evaluation and appraisal methodologies, complying with the public spending code and ensuring that all investments deliver demonstrable benefits to citizens, communities and businesses across Ireland.

As Accounting Officer for the Department, I am determined to learn from any issues that have arisen in the past with a view to ensuring this programme of investment and existing programmes of investment provide the optimum value for money to the benefit of all taxpayers and communities we serve. The Comptroller and Auditor General and this committee have an important role to play in identifying issues and in challenging and supporting the Department in addressing issues as they arise. This is in addition to the controls and processes that are already in place within the Department. We have worked very constructively in recent years with the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, seeking its advice and input where issues arise, and taking on board its recommendations for improvements in how we govern expenditure and the management of risk within the Department.

With regard to my appearance here today, the briefing note provided to the committee outlines: the key achievements of the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs in 2016 by programme area; and the programme priorities of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht for 2017-18 and the future. The briefing note also provides some detail on the Galway art house cinema project which is the subject of Chapter 15 of the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General for 2016 and which opened to the public last week.

The committee will be aware that in June 2016, as part of the restructuring of Departments announced by the Taoiseach, a new Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs was established. It essentially brought together all of the functions from the then Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, together with regional development and rural related functions from the then Department of Environment, Community and Local Government, and the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources.

Responsibility for the regional and rural affairs functions, along with certain community functions that were previously dealt with by the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, formally transferred to the new Department of Rural and Community Development with effect from 27 July 2017. The Department was renamed the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht with effect from 1 August 2017.

The year 2016 was a very significant one for the Department as we celebrated the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916. The Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme was a whole-of-Government initiative, led by the then Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs to provide the nation with the opportunity to remember and reflect on this pivotal event in our history.

There was an extensive and diverse programme of State ceremonial and public events. An array of community-led projects was delivered throughout the country in conjunction with local authorities. An extensive education programme was delivered across all levels, and a number of significant capital projects were completed under the permanent reminders component of the programme, including the GPO Witness History Centre, Richmond Barracks, the Kevin Barry rooms at the National Concert Hall and Ionad Cultúrtha an Phiarsaigh in Rosmuc.

As the Irish language was central to the 1916 ideal of an independent sovereign Ireland, the language was interwoven throughout the programme of events, while a distinctive range of events and activities through Irish was delivered as part of An Teanga Bheo – the living language strand of the programme. The entire programme was underpinned by five intersecting and overlapping themes: remembering, reconciling, presenting, imagining and celebrating.

The response to the programme was a year of extraordinary participation, by all walks of life, across all of the components, ranging from concerts and exhibitions at our national cultural institutions, to schools’ activities, flag-raising ceremonies, events to remember the role of women in 1916 and, indeed, to remember the children who lost their lives during the Rising and a whole range of other shared community, historical and cultural events. This remarkable level of participation was in many ways epitomised by the crowds of more than one million people on the streets of Dublin on Easter weekend 2016.

In December 2016 Creative Ireland was launched as the Government’s legacy programme from the Ireland 2016 initiative and as the main implementation vehicle for the ambition set out in Culture 2025 - Éire Ildánach, Ireland’s first national cultural policy developed on foot of an extensive consultation process with stakeholders throughout the country.

The Department’s proposed programme of investment under Project Ireland 2040 prioritises strategic and sustainable projects that demonstrate clear public benefits as committed to under the Clár Éire Ildánach, the Creative Ireland programme, and goes beyond this to deliver much-needed investment in our national parks, monuments, built and natural heritage, language and islands.

Ensuring that we take the lessons from the past as we move towards a 10 year investment programme in culture and heritage is critically important and I therefore welcome the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General as outlined in Chapter 15 of the 2016 report. That chapter examined the administration and management of the Galway art house cinema project, including funding and payments made by the Department and other public bodies related to the new cinema. There were two recommendations made by the Comptroller and Auditor General on foot of this detailed examination, both of which I have accepted in full in my capacity as Accounting Officer for the Department.

The first recommendation was that the Department should review its approach to the projects that are being grant aided, in particular where the key project risks are carried by the State. Where projects do not progress as expected or serious shortcomings are identified with the project sponsor, early action needs to be taken, including formal reviews of the project viability, in line with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform’s public spending code requirements.

I can assure the committee that the Department is fully committed to ensuring that all projects are effectively managed in accordance with the public spending code and relevant grant circulars. Measures are in place to ensure that staff are appropriately trained and supported in the appraisal and oversight of grant-aided projects as part of the Department’s annual quality assurance process, and the Department held a number of training sessions around the appraisal and management of capital projects in 2016 and, as promised to the Comptroller and Auditor General, in 2017, and as recently as March 2018.

The second recommendation of the Comptroller and Auditor General was that particular care should be exercised by lead funders to ensure adequate formal oversight mechanisms are in place and operated where a variety of funding agencies are involved.

Once again, I reiterate my commitment as Accounting Officer to ensure that all projects are managed in accordance with the provisions of the public spending code and relevant circulars. The training provided to staff in the past two years has emphasised the importance of the early establishment of performance metrics to be used as a signal for action during the implementation phase, the need for regular management reports to be provided and reviewed, and how best to deal with project challenges.

In addition, I wish to advise the committee that the Department is participating in an organisational capability review, to be conducted by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform later this year. The purpose of these reviews, which are being rolled out across all Departments under the Civil Service renewal programme, are to embed a culture of regular and objective assessments of the capacity and capability of the Department to achieve its objectives. While only a small number of Departments or agencies have been reviewed to date, I had actively sought to have an early review of this Department, and I believe this will prepare us well to deal with the challenges that lie ahead as we move towards implementation of a ten-year capital investment programme.

I am establishing an advisory group within the Department to contribute to both the preparatory work and the delivery phases of the review, which is due to commence in the second half of 2018, and will ensure that the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Committee of Public Accounts will be taken into account in the review process. I am confident that this review will facilitate the Department in building the required capacity for the effective evaluation, appraisal and management of capital projects. It will identify the skills, structures, processes and personnel needed on top of what we already have, and determine whether such structures need to be put in place to deliver effectively for all our stakeholders, which include the taxpayer. I am happy to expand on any of these areas, or explore any other areas as the committee wishes.