Many readers will remember the sudden closure of the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast over two years ago. That Northern Ireland's flagship space for contemporary art should shut its doors overnight shocked the visual-arts community throughout Ireland.
Shortly after the closure, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) took over running the space. How did ACNI run it? Today, Daniel Jewesbury has released his analysis of specific aspects of their stewardship. It makes for interesting reading. This is the text:
The following information is the result of several successive Freedom of Information requests made to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, between 2006 and 2008.
These requests specifically concern how much money was spent running Ormeau Baths Galley during the time that the Arts Council controlled it directly themselves, between 2006 and 2007. The gallery closed in Feb 06 and was re-opened by ACNI just a couple of months later. They ran it directly until the new company, Ormeau Avenue Gallery Ltd, was able to take over in June 07.
At the time they forced the closure of OBG (by withdrawing its funding and making the company insolvent), ACNI drew attention to inaccuracies in OBG's accounts, and went so far as to allege 'financial impropriety'. It had already been shown by the auditors appointed by the Arts Council, however, that there was no such 'impropriety'; they concluded that the minor clerical and book-keeping errors that were identified did not constitute 'financial mismanagement'.
The first document disclosed by the Arts Council shows the income and expenditure on OBG during 06/07. You can view this spreadsheet at <http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pGBpU9wp3Jwz9zfSjwJngWw>. ACNI continued to run OBG until June 07, two months after the financial year covered by these accounts ended, so this information is itself incomplete, and will need to be revised when the ACNI accounts for 07/08 are published (these are required to be published by Nov 08). A very large figure - £46,553 - is given under 'publicity'. This is clearly a sum that no other arts organisation in Northern Ireland would spend on publicity. I first queried the amount that was being spent on publicity over a year ago, and was given a rough figure that was less than two-thirds of this amount (this final figure was only released last month). This figure is itself two-thirds of what was spent on the actual exhibitions in the gallery.
A second spreadsheet was released by the Arts Council when this publicity figure was queried, and is available to view at <http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pGBpU9wp3Jwwmgluoy95OYw>. This is a breakdown of all the costs under the 'publicity' figure in the accounts. Under each subheading, large sums are shown as outgoing to 'Anderson Spratt' - a company in fact called Anderson Spratt Holdings, one of whose directors is Peter Spratt, an ACNI Council member, and a former Board member of OBG when the gallery director was Hugh Mulholland (Anderson Spratt also designed the OBG logo). The total figure spent on contracts awarded to Anderson Spratt is £41,472.54. Also listed is a company listed called Tibus, which stands for The Internet Business, at this time a wholly owned subsidiary of Anderson Spratt. They were paid an extra £968.67. Therefore, in one financial year, the grand total paid for publicity services, to companies who have a director on Council, is £42,441.21 - out of a total of £46,533.
The Arts Council say that they operated within Public Procurement legislation when they committed these expenses. There are currently no details in the public realm on what this process involved. The Central Procurement Directorate have no details on any contracts for ACNI for 06/07. Further information on this matter would therefore have to be the subject of another Freedom of Information request to ACNI.
This expenditure was a direct result of the closure of the gallery, arising from a decision that had to be approved by the members of the Arts Council themselves. Furthermore, this expenditure would never have been made public had it not been for these Freedom of Information requests: at this point, during 06-07, OBG was not a 'client', so no mention was made in the ACNI's accounts of sums paid to run it, and nor did it publish any accounts of its own, since it had no separate corporate existence.
This note is not suggesting any improper conduct by anyone involved, in terms of existing rules and legislation; however, the information given here does make visible certain aspects of how ACNI ran OBG, and these aspects are a cause for considerable concern.
Other points:
- Creditors of Ormeau Baths Gallery Ltd received about 10p in the pound on the sums they were owed. This includes the pension schemes of former staff and fees owed to gallery technicians;
- Staff received 48 hours notice of their redundancy and were paid the statutory minimum redundancy payment of 1 weeks' pay for each year worked;
- OBG has not had a director since Hugh Mulholland was effectively sacked, and its chair also recently resigned;
- ACNI's 'visual arts strategy' for the next period is currently out to tender;
- The Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure and the Arts Council are committed to supporting the new Metropolitan Arts Centre which will soon be built in the Cathedral Quarter.
