No more government money will be spent on unused art gallery scanner – minister

No more government funding will be given to help house an unused scanner bought by the National Gallery eight years ago, Patrick O’Donovan has said.

The Arts Minister said the issue around how the X-ray scanner was bought without preparations being made for where it would go was “not insignificant, it is not small”.

The newly appointed minister also said his department was not blameless either.

The National Gallery said it purchased an X-ray system valued at 124,805 euro in November 2017, funded by the Cultural Digitisation Scheme.

There have been issues finding a location for the scanner as it needs a lead-lined room for a radioactive component and some of the National Gallery building’s floors cannot take the weight of the machine.

The X-ray system is being stored in the basement of the Dublin gallery, while the supplier still has the X-ray bulb.

Mr O’Donovan raised the issue at Cabinet on Tuesday through the gallery’s annual report and accounts, which raised the ire of both Government and opposition politicians.

Asked if more funding would be given by the Government to resolve the issue, Mr O’Donovan said: “No, not from the public purse.”

He said the National Gallery had said they would house the machine using “their own resources”.

He said the problem appeared to be because of “really, really poor project management” but added that his own department was “not without question here”.

“You wouldn’t buy a horse without having somewhere to stable it, but it seems that this was bought without really any knowledge within the gallery of where they were going to put it, place it or use it,” he told RTE Radio.

“This is not a light machine, it weighs a considerable amount, and it’s not on every floor that it can be placed because of the load bearing.

“The National Gallery is a historic building and it is a conserved building, so there’s a lot of the floors that aren’t capable of holding up an instrument of this scale.

“As well as that, it has an ionising radiation source, so you can’t stick it just in any room, because there’s a risk, obviously, to the operators, it has to operate under an EPA licence. People have to be properly trained to use it.

“None of that was done, it seems to me, before this machine was bought. This machine was bought in the hope that they would be able to find somewhere to put it into and work backwards, and of course, when you’re doing that, you’re going to find yourself in major difficulty. And that seems to me, without having this concluded, that seems to me, to be the biggest issue here.”