Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
‘FREE’ SEAMUS HEANEY EXHIBITION WHICH COST IRISH TAXPAYERS €2M
Politician tells of concern after ‘significant’ spend on poet display
AN exhibition celebrating the work of poet Seamus Heaney has cost taxpayers in Ireland more than €2million to set up.
The Mirror can reveal the Republic coughed up £548,000 to pay UK experts Ralph Appelbaum and Associates to come up with its layout.
Irish TD Catherine Murphy said last night: “It does appear to be a significant amount and we still have a significant restriction on what we can spend in this country.”
The Social Democrats TD for Kildare North added social and affordable housing, health and social care are Ireland’s “greatest priorities”.
The free-entry show’s website promises visitors “a multi-sensory journey from Heaney’s origins through his remarkable poetic career”.
But the cost of designing it alone would pay for 20 full-time nurses for a whole year or 57,000 hours of home help for the sick and elderly.
And under Ireland’s generous tax relief measures for artists, Heaney’s family recouped £1.25million when they donated the collection to the State. On top of this, the Irish Government has forked out £26,000 to promote it.
Heaney, from Co Derry, won the Nobel Prize for Literature and died in 2013, aged 74.
A spokesperson for the Department of Culture and
Heritage told the Daily
Mirror: “The Archive Of Seamus Heaney was donated to the National Library. The total value of the archive donated was £1,560,000. An amount equal to 80% of the market value is what the donors received.
“The spend on advertising and promotion in 2017 and 2018 to date by the NLI for the exhibition is approximately £25,000.”
Officials insist it is money well spent and a spokesman added: “The Seamus Heaney exhibition is drawn from the library’s extensive archive of Heaney documents. “It features original manuscripts as well as letters, unpublished works, diary entries, photographs and recordings.”
Ireland’s Culture and Heritage Minister Josepha Madigan also praised the writer’s family last month.
She said: “I take this opportunity to thank the Heaney family for their remarkable philanthropy and for strongly supporting this initiative.”
But Ms Murphy told the Daily Mirror that while the value of the arts cannot always be judged in monetary terms, Ireland must remain “very careful” with the public purse.
She added: “When money is very tight, you’ve got to make sure it is spent on the essentials.”
She suggested there is a greater need for consideration of public money before it is spent rather than after when decisions often end up criticised at the Public Accounts Committee.