The Stage

Abbey crisis deepens as directors resign after €2.4m loss revealed

Published Monday 16 May 2005 at 13:25 by Anthony Garvey

Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, has received a double blow with the news that its financial situation is much worse than had been forecast and the subsequent resignation of two of the theatre’s top directors.

The Abbey board accepted the resignations of managing director Brian Jackson and artistic director Ben Barnes after hearing that last year’s deficit is now expected to be €1.85 million - double what had been forecast - bringing the theatre’s accumulated losses to €2.4 million. An accounting error has been blamed for the fact that the loss of an additional €900,000 in 2004, reportedly as a result of touring productions in Ireland and abroad, has only recently been discovered.

The chair of the Abbey board, Eithne Healy, acknowledged that the worse than expected deficit had come as a shock, but attributed it to “human error and systems failure”. Independent consultants were being brought in to review the Abbey’s accounting and financial control systems at management level, she said, and to report on how the loss of almost a million euros had gone unnoticed for so long.

As a result of the resignations, the board has invited the Abbey’s newly appointed director, Fiach MacConghail, to take up his executive management and artistic duties immediately. He was originally planning to work alongside Barnes until the latter’s term as artistic director ended in December. Now, at the request of the board, Barnes will be available on a consultative basis until the end of July.

Jackson has also been asked to stay on temporarily to help implement the Abbey’s restructuring programme, and has agreed to do so. The effect of the new €900,000 euro loss is to cancel out a €1 million debt stablisation grant that the Irish Arts Council gave to the Abbey last year. Another million was due to be received when the theatre had completed its restructuring programme, including a cost-cutting plan that would reduce its core staff of 91 by a third. In addition, the council’s annual grant to the Abbey has been increased this year to just over €5 million.

Arts council director Mary Cloake described the disclosure of the new losses as “a bolt from the blue” and a cause of deep concern. The council is now seeking to establish why neither the theatre board nor the staff knew about the hidden deficit. Abbey sources say that a touring programme in the US and Australia last year, to celebrate the theatre’s centenary, plus an all-Ireland tour of The Playboy of the Western World, were the main factors contributing to the heavy losses.

In the wake of the latest debacle, following the troubles that marred its centenary year, there have been calls for the Abbey board to resign. Irish Labour Party arts spokesman Jack Wall said the Abbey was “becoming a joke as a result of these self-inflicted embarrassments”. Playwright and poet Ulick O’Connor claimed the board was ultimately responsible for what had happened and said members should “seriously consider their position”.

Responding to the crisis, arts minister John O’Donoghue promised a radical overhaul of the way the Abbey is run, including a new, slimmed-down board. Change was urgently needed, he said, “to bring our national theatre into the 21st century”. He also disclosed that “detailed discussions” are underway concerning a site for the new Abbey in Dublin’s docklands.