With Kathy McArdle's announcement last week that she has resigned as artistic director of Project arts centre, in Dublin, evaluations of her tenure are inevitable. Since she took up her position, in October 1999, few would deny that Project has been dogged by controversy.

As McArdle prepares to leave - her resignation will take effect in January - Project is facing very difficult times, says board member Patrick Sutton. "We don't seem to have generated sufficient income," he says, referring to the loss Project has made, details of which were discussed at a board meeting yesterday, but have yet to be made public. The deficit is in spite of the substantial Arts Council grant that the Temple Bar centre receives - £520,000 in 2000; £540,000 this year. While it was hoped that Project would break even over the past 12 months, unconfirmed estimates of its defecit are between £70,000 and £100,000.

Staff departures since McArdle took up her post have also been a problem. Apart from the resignation from the board of Alanna O'Kelly, senior departures have included Debbie Behan, who settled a constructive-dismissal case with the centre; Valerie Connor, who also left following a legal settlement; Janice McAdam; Tom Coughlin; and, most recently, Tim Brennan.

Behan, who was technical director at Project, where she had worked since 1997, says she left because she felt she was under a lot of stress and because of "interpersonal reasons". "I didn't leave because of the type of work. It was the change in the style of management," she says.

The most public of the rifts during McArdle's time involved the fall-out from her decision not to renew Connor's contract as visual-arts curator for 2001. Artists reacted vociferously, gathering a 147-name petition in support of Connor. McArdle was accused of downgrading the visual-arts programme and of leaving vacant valuable exhibition space.

Observers noted her failure to engage with her critics in the wake of the episode - something McArdle now says she would like to have dealt with differently. "Silence was interpreted as guilt. What was really at play was professional discretion."

But McArdle says she is aware there were problems. "I know that Debbie and Val would take issue with how I managed Project at that time. But that's one perspective. There are others - like the people who work there now and are happy."

Observers may wonder, however, why the board did not intervene earlier in the difficulties that have attended McArdle's time at Project. Bridget Webster, its chairwoman, says the board - of Webster, Sutton, Pat Fallon, Joseph Long, Leo Martin, Kieran Owens, Gavin Quinn and Michael Seaver - "acts in a monitoring role. It has no input in the day-to-day running of the Project".

In fact, the Connor episode went on in the public sphere from week to week, rather than from day to day. Budgetary concerns are also something that develop over time, rather than from day to day.

Webster says "it is unfortunate that some of the business of Project hasn't been allowed to remain internal". But the nature of publicly funded bodies is that external parties - notably, the public - have an interest in their running.

McArdle says she is glad to see Project business being discussed openly. She agrees that "Project is going to be facing a difficult financial situation between now and the end of the year" and that "box-office income wasn't as high as one would have hoped". But she adds that she inherited a "dire" financial situation and that "the Project ethos has never really been driven by those commercial concerns".

As Fiach Mac Conghail, a former artistic director of the centre, puts it, "any judgment of a tenure based solely on balancing the books isn't appropriate, especially for Project". McArdle's tenure has been marked not only by internal wranglings and interpersonal difficulties, but also by a tension between her stated desire to create a "subversive" space that resists cultural commodification and the demands on any public arts institution to attract audiences and be financially viable.

What is clear is that Project has neither created the buzz nor attracted the numbers expected of it when it opened at its new premises, on East Essex Street, in June last year. In more ways than one, it has proved uninviting to the public - the public McArdle said she wanted to attract when she took up her post. What McArdle once called the "pure potential" of Project seems as yet unrealised.