Jimmy Deenihan (Kerry North-West Limerick, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I refer the Deputy to my reply to Questions Nos. 37, 45, 56 and 59 on 18 September 2013.

As the Deputy may be aware, as part of the Comprehensive Review of Expenditure 2012-2014, my Department considered a range of possible options for savings in respect of its arts and culture programme area. This included a website portal and joint commercial and marketing strategy. Under the Croke Park and Haddington Road reform programme, we have now gone beyond what was contemplated by the comprehensive review of expenditure. Indeed, savings of the order of 20% to 25% in the Exchequer allocations to the cultural institutions have been made since 2010.

In tandem with that, the Government had agreed a range of reforms under the Public Service Reform Plan 2011 for a number of the national cultural institutions under the aegis of my Department. The focus within my Department and the national cultural institutions has been concentrated on the implementation of the reform plan and there has been an intensive engagement by all in that process. I have previously advised the House of the shared service models that are being developed for the national cultural institutions through my Department for corporate support services and, by formal inter-institutional agreement, for operational services. For example, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA, and the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, have been working more closely together and this has recently been formally codified by way of a shared services agreement. This commits these institutions to working more closely together in a range of areas, including human resources, procurement, conservation and photography services, collection management, including cataloguing and digitisation, storage, insurance, enterprise and marketing.

Preliminary estimates for savings provided to me earlier this year indicate that approximately €100,000 will have been saved over the course of 2012 and 2013 through the shared services agenda at the three galleries.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House

As I outlined previously, in overall terms it is expected that operational and support savings in the region of approximately €1 million will be initially realised from the reform programme across the institutions involved, which are funded from my Department's Vote group, with further savings to be identified as the various cost efficiencies are implemented. This is all against the backdrop of respecting the programming, curatorial and operational independence of the directors.

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