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:

The National Archives is funded directly from the Vote under subhead B4. Although it is a cultural institution, and rightly so, it comes directly within the Vote of the Department. We will get the committee a note on it. The Vice Chairman is correct that we are investing not just in capital, but also in the archives staff, and we are recruiting archivists at the moment in recognition of the valuable work they do. They have some very specific projects ongoing at the moment and I will ask Mr. Falvey to come in on that.

To circle back on the sport issue, under the national sports policy published in 2018, there is a new governance code that the governing bodies have committed to subscribing to by the end of 2021. As of 8 November, 47 bodies have formally adopted the code and the rest are on the journey, with more of them to be compliant by the end of the year. That is another layer of the governance, so it is not just the rolling audits.