Prime Time will have a programme on charities including Peter McVerry tonight

I see the Gardai are investigating the PMcV Trust to ascertain if there are any criminal activities involved arising out of the recent findings.

I often wonder if a Trump style review of all NGOs is warranted at this stage. So many of them appear to have serious "governance" issues ( a term that seems to cover a multitude of sins.) Plus, they all seem to get an easy ride from the media - especially RTE/Irish Times etc who they regularly feed with countless "reports" gaining impressive headlines with a heavy lobbying element.

 
To be fair the problem is that many of these charities were run for years by armies of part time volunteers. They gradually started professionalising in the 1990s and eventually started hiring professional full time management staff. The people in the front end jobs tend to be poorly paid and don't often have great conditions of work. But the management in the sector seem very entitled.

For example one charity spends about 1.7m per year, up from 700k around 20 years ago. They now have roughly 22 FTE. About 1.3m comes from the state and the rest from donations or fund raising. Their 5 highest paid senior management earn about 400k between them, but in 2004, their former director was being paid 80k per year at a time the entire expenditure was only 700k. So its clear that this charity has far better governance and controls than it did 20 years ago. And interestingly, that original director went on to be a controversially high earner in another charity, whose direction he drastically changed under his leadership, much to the chagrin of many former supporters and as the link shows, there was considerable disquiet about his earnings.

To be fair the situation has changed a lot since high earning charity executives were being dragged into Leinster House to be theatrically grilled by the PAC. But in general a lot of the issue is that charities are far bigger now and are no longer operated by voluntary supporters. The bitter rows in some organisations like the Irish Countrywomens Association are a good example of this struggle to cope with the size of the structure and need for good governance.
 
Another NGO/Charity under the spotlight. Three separate investigations no less!


This latest development means there are now three separate probes going on into the activities at the charity, formerly known as the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI) – the Charities Regulator investigation, the HSE review into matters of concern and a fact-finding exercise by the organisation itself.

The Charities Regulator is also carrying out a separate investigation into another charity for blind people, Fighting Blindness. The various probes all follow information provided by whistleblowers.
 
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