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.

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?