Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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109. To ask the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht if she will provide a schedule of the amount of funds, beneficiary of funds and use of funds released by her Department under the per cent for art scheme in each of the past five years to date in 2023, in tabular form. [23592/23]

Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party)
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In 1997, the Government authorised the inclusion in the budgets of all Exchequer-funded capital construction projects of an amount of up to 1% as funding for an art project, subject to an overall cap of €64,000.  This authorised expenditure has been reviewed occasionally, most recently with effect from 1 January, 2022.  Although the Per Cent for Art Scheme is within the general remit of my Department, there is not any specified resource allocation for it.  The funding of art projects brought forward under the scheme is integral to the capital project budget in each case and to be addressed by the project promoters.  My Department does not provide funding for the inclusion of art projects in other Departments' projects such as roads, schools or hospitals, and these are a matter for the contracting bodies themselves.

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 would 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 is continuously updated and includes almost 250 permanent and temporary, public and socially engaged artworks made in Ireland or made by Irish artists abroad.  Many of these artworks were produced under the Percent for Art Scheme.

The Percent for Art Scheme was revised and the updated investment bands and limits for this scheme came into effect on 1 Jan 2020. 

Under the auspices of the Arts Council, a National Per Cent for Art Committee was established in 2022 in relation to updating the guidelines for the Scheme. The ad hoc committee includes representatives of Government Departments and public agencies charged with managing public capital programmes. The Group is chaired independently by Dr Ciarán Benson. The Arts Council provides the expert guidance and secretariat function to the committee, who are expected to complete their work by early 2024.