Critic Conneely gone but Galway 2020’s problems persist

Bradley Bytes – A Political Column with Dara Bradley 

Galway 2020’s problems haven’t gone away.

One of the company’s fiercest critics – Pádraig Conneely – may be gone from public life, but its fundamental issue, funding, or a lack of it, persists.

Since Conneely’s retirement from politics in May, the controversies surrounding Galway 2020’s European Capital of Culture aren’t thrashed out as much in the public domain.

Don’t be fooled: problems may be out of sight and out of mind but they’re still there.

Part of the problem is that the bid book, Making Waves – the document that won Galway the designation – overpromised. And the company set up to deliver on the bid book is struggling to fulfil all those promises.

One of the reasons the company struggled initially to fulfil the bid book’s ambitious targets is because of issues with appointments, to the Board and to key positions in the company.

A Business Engagement Director was supposed to be appointed in December 2017; but that process was botched, and the Board then decided in January of that year not to appoint anyone to that role. Arguably the most important position after a CEO, the Business Engagement Director would have been tasked with raising €6.75 million in private sponsorship.

Galway 2020’s current funding problems can be traced back to its decision against appointing someone to tap private businesses for cash. In the meantime, Galway 2020 was hit with setback after setback, and the feelgood factor that initially greeted winning the designation has evaporated. Companies which had pledged sponsorship lost confidence and were reluctant to part with their cash.

Now we’ve a situation, weeks out from the programme launch (which will be a far smaller affair in Eyre Square than initially envisaged, see Page One), and just months from the official launch – and Galway 2020 isn’t within an ass’s roar of €6.75 million in sponsorship money.

By the end of December 2018, it had raised just €30,000 in hard, cold cash from private sources.

Galway 2020 puts on a brave face – it has to – and talks about “in-kind support” and the overall budget being a “value proposition” rather than cash. But there’s no mention of “value proposition” in the bid book, and the bid book’s €6.75 million target for private sponsorship was income, not “in-kind” support. Galway 2020 is now talking of a “fundraising and partnerships pipeline” of €4.5 million, rather than €6.75 million, even though it insists its bid book target (of €6.75 million in sponsorship income) hasn’t changed.

An organisation that cannot be up-front, and answer the simple question, ‘How much sponsorship income has been raised so far?’ isn’t one you’d place a whole pile of faith in, is it? There may be reasons to obfuscate – mainly because it hasn’t reached its targets – but it only serves to further undermine the very thing they’re trying to build: confidence in the Capital of Culture . . . For more Bradley Bytes, see this week’s Galway City Tribune.