Later in the game, Link must return to Outset Island to retrieve a Triforce Chart from the Savage Labyrinth, where a Piece of Heart is also located. ![]() While this is sometimes viewed with scepticism by arts practitioners who see more resources going into administration and less into art-making, the council has some justification for its contention that the process is necessary in order to advance the case for better State funding.Link's quest begins on Outset Island and it is where Link gets his first sword, loses his sister, and leaves his grandmother to set off on his journey to find Aryll. With the support of the Arts Council, many arts organisations have moved over the last decade or more to professionalise their operations, modernise their structures and ensure they’re fully compliant with company law. Responding to a query from Radio Kerry, the council said it keeps an arms length relationship with all the festivals that it supports and “any questions are for the board of Writers’ Week”. It was announced at a meeting in September that the board had accepted the report in full and committed to implement all of its recommendations, including the disbanding of the committee. According to local reports, Dermot McLaughlin, a consultant commissioned by the Arts Council, made a number of recommendations including the disbanding of the committee and the hiring of a curator. The board had been run by its voluntary committee since the festival’s establishment in 1970, although a board had been established in recent years. There’s a row going on in Listowel right now over changes in the structure of the organisation that runs the town’s decades-old Writers Week festival. There are questions about how the council’s own commitment to transparency operates in practice, and about how it implements its own relationship with the bodies it supports ![]() This inevitably leads at times to friction. In recent years, the council has taken a more interventionist role in requiring – some would say imposing – particular governance structures among its client organisations. This has been rejected by the department on the basis that the Mazars report has essentially covered the same ground.Īll of this raises governance questions not just for the Abbey but for the Arts Council itself. McLaren and Murray’s protected disclosure to the Arts Council, the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, and the Department of Arts sought a “full inquiry into governance failings inherent in this matter and into the questionable culture and decision-making” at the Abbey”. A letter from the chair of the Abbey board, Frances Ruane, said the report “not only accepted that the Abbey Theatre had resources of its own to fund these expenditures but also did not find any evidence to contradict the Abbey Theatre’s repeated statement that it did not use Arts Council grant funding.” which is a subtly different interpretation.Īmid all of this, it’s worth noting that three complaints from people formerly employed at the theatre, regarding separate incidents involving Graham McLaren, have had no outcome. You might have thought the Arts Council, which has been funding the Abbey for decades, would have been aware of this. As the council’s largest single funding recipient, the Abbey relies on the State for a very large part of its annual revenue.īut, as its final report makes clear: “Mazars cannot definitively state what sources of funding were used to cover the HR investigations and termination payments, as the Abbey Theatre has several sources of unrestricted funding and does not specifically allocate expenditure against income sources in their normal accounting records.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar instruction. The Arts Council sent in consultants Mazars to investigate the circumstances surrounding the spending, and to establish whether public money had been used “for the purposes intended for them”. But, thanks to Deirdre Falvey’s investigation in last Saturday’s Irish Times, we do now know that this tangled tale has led to serious friction between some of the protagonists, and to a protected disclosure by McLaren and Murray to the Department of Arts. ![]() There is still plenty we don’t know about the circumstances surrounding the almost €700,000 in costs incurred by the Abbey Theatre on “HR investigations” (a euphemism for legal fees) and termination payments for former artistic directors Graham McLaren and Neil Murray.
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