Minister for Arts and Culture Patrick O’Donovan said the National Gallery of Ireland will use its own resources to bring a €120,000 specialist art scanner into use this year, eight years after its purchase.
The X-ray machine, which is used to inspect valuable works in an unintrusive way, has lain idle for almost a decade because no suitable room to house it has been found.
The Minister questioned why the gallery bought an expensive piece of equipment before deciding where it was going to be placed given its specialised requirements.
“That seems to be the biggest issue,” he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.
The gallery appeared to have “worked backwards” by purchasing the scanner before knowing where it could be stored and operated.
The Minister expressed concern over the poor project management that led to the purchase of the scanner.
Mr O’Donovan also questioned why the machine, described as “fundamental to its workings” by the art gallery, would then sit on a pallet for eight years.
The gallery had a priceless collection and “people would accept the need for equipment to be used to restore, maintain and conserve some of our national collection,” he said.
“However, to have it bought and not used, literally sitting on a pallet in a downstairs room is something that really, you know, is not acceptable.
“It seems to me that this was a case of really, really poor project management. You wouldn’t buy a horse without having stables.”
The national art gallery was a historic building so there were many floors that would not have been capable of “holding up an instrument of this scale, as well as that it has an ionising radiation source”, which poses a risk to the operator, he said. “It has to operate under an EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] licence. People have to be properly trained to use it.”
All of these matters should have been clarified before the machine was purchased, said Mr O’Donovan. It appeared that the gallery had not even organised for the ionising radiation source, which still remains in the UK.
When asked about reports that the gallery was now planning to locate the scanner in a Portakabin, the Minister said he had not been informed of such plans, and that any plans to find an appropriate location for the scanner would not be funded by his department but would come from the gallery’s funds.
The only role of the Office of Public Works (OPW) was to provide advice to the gallery as the OPW owned the building.
Mr O’Donovan said it was not a case of “piling on the blame here” on the gallery, adding a grant had been provided by his department to purchase the scanner and it was the Comptroller and Auditor General that included it in a report brought to Cabinet.
“Which begs the question: where was the oversight for the intervening period? And why didn’t somebody ask the question: what should we do with that machine over in the gallery? Has it been switched on yet?”