Peter McVerry Trust has 'financial issues'.

A million a week going through it, where does all the money go? Why is the CEO on circa €110k? Why does a country as small as Ireland have over 11,500 charities?

But the CEOs salary is basically irrelevant. If they had someone on the average wage doing it I'd be vastly more concerned!

The CEO of a charity’s salary is very much relevant, particularly when the charity claims to be experiencing ‘cash flow pressures’. The point being they are not just a medium sized property development firm.

I completely understand that if a charity were looking to hire you that you’d be looking for the same terms as if they were any other employer, and that is indeed the way these medium sized charities are being run, as though they are like any other employer, when in reality they’re just not. I’ve been involved with a few of these charities on an entirely voluntary basis in similar roles to others who were directly employed by the charity, and much of the reason they grow to be the size they are is because of the amount of public funding they receive, as opposed to relying on donations from the public which don’t amount to a whole lot of their annual revenue.

They wouldn’t be nearly as large as they are without receiving public funding to manage housing which, while it is ultimately saving the Exchequer a bundle, it gives the wrong impression to suggest that a CEO salary should be €100k, for no other reason other than it’s the market rate for a CEO position in the private sector. Charities which are experiencing cash flow pressures would do well to take another leaf from the private sector - the idea of the one-dollar salary for the CEO position:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

Who is going to be a 'one dollar salary' CEO for a charity?

A one dollar CEO is doing it because they make money off having shares in the company. Are you proposing that a charity CEO should get a share of the charities assets? Because without a rather exceptional clarification of who you think would be CEO for free, that's the only other outcome from a 'one dollar salary' CEO. Or are you just slamming a buzzword in here without any idea of what it means?

110k is already a small salary for a CEO of an organisation of that scale, by the way.

Rather like when people suggest tiny salaries for TDs, nobody seems to ever realise the result of doing so .

If you give two euro to someone on the street that is charity.

If there is a middleman between you and that person who lives off a percentage of that two euro then it's a business. It has no right to call itself a charity.

The statement admits there's "potential financial issues".

It doesn't look good.

Having worked in both the private sector, and as I mentioned previously - having worked with some of these charities, I can tell you that there would be no issue whatsoever in finding people who are willing to volunteer their time, skills, expertise and experience in service of causes that mean something to them. Unquestionably they are a very different calibre to the kind of person who a charity seeks to attract by offering them a €100k salary! 😂

No, the person who appears to be using the buzzword ‘charity’ with no apparent understanding of what it means is you, and indeed any organisation which is registered as a charity, but run like a private organisation, as though their primary source of funding isn’t practically guaranteed by receiving funding from the public purse in return for their services to the State. It’s not an unreasonable expectation that they would be able to provide value for the amount of public money they receive from the Exchequer seeing as they’re not answerable to shareholders.

I’m well aware that €100k is a small salary for an organisation of their scale in the private sector btw. I’m not comparing charity organisations to organisations the private sector - they are two very different things. Organisations in the private sector aren’t operating on the basis of charity. Charity organisations on the other hand, as the term suggests, should be, as opposed to being run like a business which is not required to make a profit.

When a charity can’t even break even, then looking at the salaries of their Board of Directors or their Board of Governors is usually the first place to look in terms of cost cutting measures given the vast majority of their employees are already on the breadline given what they’re actually being paid (and I’m not referring to their employees on various State-sponsored employment schemes). Either that, or they should look to scale back operations, rather than having the hand out for even more public funding like they’re siphoning money from a never-ending supply of it.

Their first mistake was contacting the trust …. Should have contacted the Gardai

big a big mistake if anything is proven… donors will walk away elsewhere with their cash.

It's an industry now.

Whether or not these charities help homelessness is another matter.

Charities have been businesses for a very long time.

It's the same question as it always was, and you can't answer it

Your wall of text does nothing to support the idea that a charity could get a "one dollar salary" CEO, and you've fallen for buzzword bollox.

It’s not the same question it always was! You first asked who is going to be a one-dollar CEO for a charity, and then you asked me who, that is actually competent for the role, is likely to offer to be CEO of a relatively large charity for a nominal fee? I know many people who would, but they wouldn’t offer to be CEO of any charity where they didn’t agree with how the organisation was being run.

I’ve not fallen for any buzzword bollocks, and I’m certainly not falling for the idea that a charity wouldn’t be able to source a CEO on an entirely voluntary basis (the reason for the ‘one-dollar’ is due to Federal regulations in the US, that wouldn’t apply here). You need to come up with a more compelling explanation in order to justify the salary offered for a CEO position in a charity organisation when the organisation is in financial difficulty already in spite of the fact that they are not required to make a profit! 😳

This is an enterprise with a €50 million turnover, much of which is provided by the taxpayer. It's ludicrous to suggest that it should be managed and run by volunteer staff for free. Of course it should be a professional operation; that's a no-brainer.

Having paid, qualified, regularly-employed staff doesn't make it one whit less of a charitable concern. And the notion that there is any meaningful link between the cashflow issues they report experiencing and the 0.2% of turnover that is consumed by the CEO's salary is a mind-numbingly silly one.

There may be aspects of this charity that ought to be investigated, but this is certainly not one of them.

Housing charities/agencies shouldn't exist.

We've a heap of housing agencies all trying to do the same thing with public money. They run aground financially and its up to the Taxpayer then to clean up the mess. It's an absolute joke.

Just have one agency, run by the government and outlaw the rest.

Does this exist in anywhere else in the world the way it does in Ireland?

Exactly!

I think the last 15/20 years the Government has not been "governing" and everyone has been just let rip. You can just do what you want now.

There's all sorts of mad stuff going on in society now. I actually don't think it's fixable at this stage.

So many NGO's/Charities do exactly the same thing and would be much more efficient if they were merged.

GOAL/Trocaire/Concern essentially do the same thing, there is zero need for the 3 of them to exist yet they do.Much better use of resources to amalgamate them all and it would improve efficiency and more money would get to the people and places that need it.

Of course you do that it means less managerial/executive roles and therefore it'll never happen.

I've donated to Alice Leahy Trust, that seems to genuinely rely mostly/ completely on public contributions

Never to any of the others, with their hands out for more and more taxpayers money every year.

...so what part of society/economoy should be providing this fundamental need?

Earlier someone noted that many of the housing charities were set up by volunteers like - people like Fr. McVerry, Sr. Statislaus Kennedy and Sr. Jean Quinn - and I'd add Fr. Patrick Coogan to the list. They may not have drawn a wage, and may well live very simply - but they are all members of religious orders which provide food, housing, clothing, health insurance, etc. Totally unfair to compare them with regular volunteers.

It’s not though. The other poster I was responding to was making the point that nobody would want to be the CEO of the organisation on a voluntary basis. The founders worked on a voluntary basis to establish the organisations in the first place. They didn’t grow to the size they are without being run like a private enterprise, receiving more and more public funding as they expanded to the point they’re at now where the cost of doing business is beginning to hit home. The funding was always contingent upon deliverables, and the organisation, like many of their clients, or service users, are feeling the financial strain of being unable to meet their costs.

I haven’t suggested this particular organisation should be managed and run by volunteer staff, it’s gone too far for that. It’s why I pointed out to the poster I was responding to that it would be unlikely they would find anyone willing to volunteer their time, skills and experience to fill the CEO role, because they’re not interested in filling the role with someone who cares about the cause more than they care about the financial remuneration for themselves. They’re competing for funding and management of housing with other organisations so bringing in people from the private sector with experience in seeking funding and managing funding and managing an organisation of its size are how it grows.

I don’t think there is any aspect of the charity which needs to be investigated at all tbh. It’s quite clear that they’ve been spending money like it was going out of fashion, and now they’re struggling to compete with other organisations who are just managed better, like Tuath Housing, who had a record year in 2022:

https://tuathhousing.ie/news-stories/2022-a-record-breaking-year-for-tuath-housing/

It’s not a mind-numbingly silly notion to look at where they could cut costs, because they need to run a hell of a tighter ship, but they’ve known that for years, and continued to operate as though the funding would never run out and they could be the biggest player in the market. It looks like they may well have to look at scaling back operations as other charities move in on their territory.

If the will was there, investment/ pension funds and related developers could be used - under properly framed legislation that would control rents & profits etc.

I have been hugely critical on these pages for many years of the "poverty industry", the charities that are dedicated to perpetuating themselves and their funding and not really wanting to solve problems, because without a homelessness problem, we wouldn't need homeless charities.

So, even when they are getting huge amounts of money from the State, they have to say that the problem is getting bigger so that they can get more money and keep on growing. If homelessness was solved tomorrow, the biggest losers would be charities like PMVT.

I am not one bit surprised about the problems. Issues were clear within PMVT last year when there was a corpse found after a week in one of their apartments. Either they were not doing the inspections they claimed to be doing (and were funded for) or the people they hired to do them were incompetent.

We must end the funding of homelessness charities and bring their functions back under government. Problem is, the local authorities, who you would expect to take over, are probably only slightly less incompetent than the charities.

There is no point in giving money to charities in Ireland, I stopped that years ago, give time, work for your local charities and groups, sit on boards, help out schools etc.

There is no point in giving money to charities in Ireland, I stopped that years ago, give time, work for your local charities and groups, sit on boards, help out schools etc.

I don’t agree with that. There is of course a point in donating money to charities in Ireland - they use it to provide services to more people than I as an individual on my own could provide. That’s due to a number of factors, including logistics, negotiation with stakeholders and of course managing funding from various sources including the amount of public funding they receive.

The principle of never attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence (or something like that) applies to a lot of these charities which on the face of it are run like a well-oiled machine, but behind the scenes it’s all too often a very different story. The vast majority of people involved in the charities are people who care about the cause, and then there are the tiny minority of people who care more about what’s in it for themselves. That’s missing the point of charity, which is characterised by the idea that it is an altruistic endeavour.

Simply reviewing the accounts will tell you very little about the organisations operations, at best all it will do is give you a headache 😂

It won’t tell you for example, like the example you mentioned earlier, that staff aren’t conducting inspections in accordance with the organisations guidelines or policies (and there are many, many policies!).

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s pointless telling people not to donate when they will completely ignore your advice and donate anyway, sometimes in the region of thousands left to national charity organisations in their wills. They donate to local charities too at the same time, it’s not as though anyone has to decide between one or the other, just donate to whatever charity works for the causes they care about. How they perceive the operation being run and it’s effectiveness will undoubtedly determine whether or not they give to one charity over another.

Is it really any surprise? I suppose the only surprise is that it has taken this long for something like this to come out. The impression I get is that the charity sector is like wild west, lawless. How many scandals have we had now relating to all sorts of charities? As @ZookeeperDub pointed out above "how do people still give to charity" considering what has gone on.

For me it is has hard to give to the big charities or NGO's because you don't know where the money is going. I myself will only give to 2 charities, one is Saint Francis hospice and that is because of the care and compassion that they gave my dad in his final weeks, not only did they take care of him but I think they saved my mam as well because the only other option was having him at home and there is no way my mam or the rest of us, as the HSE wanted, have been able to take care of him 24x7. I think that would have taken so much out of my mam as well that she would have ended sick as well. The other charity is a small local Autism charity that was set up by a good friend and few other families who despite promises weren't getting the help off the HSE that their children needed so they got together and set up a charity and it has gone from strength to strength and you can see the work they do and the impact it has on the kids and their families. But they are the only ones and only because I can see the work going on and what they are doing where as with a lot of the other charities you don't see what they are doing and the money goes into a black hole. I also think the bigger a charity gets the more chance you get of the predators moving in and taking advantage.