Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Fianna Fail)
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249. To ask the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht if her Department carries out any ongoing evaluation of the per cent for the arts scheme; if her Department gathers statistics in relation to the number of State aided capital projects to which the scheme applied; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [2963/15]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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A Government Decision in 1997 approved the inclusion in budgets for all Exchequer-funded capital construction projects of up to 1% as funding for an art project, subject to an overall cap of €64,000. While my Department has responsibility for the promotion of the Per Cent for Art Scheme, it does not have a budget for it. It therefore does not provide funding for the individual art projects and does not directly collect statistics on the scheme.

The scheme does not operate on the basis of a specific public art fund from which moneys are drawn to undertake or to commission works of an artistic nature. Rather, under the terms of the Scheme, such works are factored into and funded from the overall budget of each capital project by the public body undertaking it. This is a matter for each project promoter or commissioning body and I, as Minister, have no statutory function in this regard.

Guidelines on the Per Cent for Art Scheme are available on the Public Art website www.publicart.ie. The guidelines set out how project managers are to operate the scheme and provide a common national approach to its implementation. The Public Art website is also a comprehensive Public Art resource, which offers information on the operation of the scheme, as well as much of the output of the scheme. This includes a continuously updated of almost 250 permanent and temporary, public and socially engaged artworks made in Ireland, or of artwork made by Irish artists abroad. Many of these artworks were produced under the Percent for Art Scheme.