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:

We place great importance on adherence to the conditions of the grant management circular and corporate governance generally.

In this instance, Galway 2020 was a one-off. It probably will not happen again for 20 years. Although the conditions in question were not in the PDA, they were rigorously enforced in terms of drawdown of funding, and we do that for all our other management programmes. The grantees have to make a declaration that the material they presented to us was not used to draw down grants elsewhere. We already rigorously apply that. The issue here was that we did not put it into the PDA as a specific condition. Obviously, if we were doing it again, we would. We totally accept the recommendation.