Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has been three years in government and it is wearing a little thin that he is trying to excuse all his delays with what we did. We brought in the Act. We enacted it in my time in the Department. The issue now is why we waited three years to have the regulator put in place and how the Minister could believe that we did not need a regulator. He was looking to see if we could avoid having a regulator. It is extraordinary. By not moving to put the regulator in place properly to regulate the sector, the Minister has deterred ordinary people from putting money the way of charities since this controversy broke. The cost of the regulator to the taxpayer would have been very small compared to the loss of income to genuine charities who are working genuinely for the good of people.

There seems to be a belief that all charities in this State are mega organisations like the ones around which this controversy has grown. Most charities are driven by ordinary people. We must have a situation where ordinary people can serve on boards. We must not deter all the ordinary people from serving on boards because they do not have legal or accounting proficiency. They bring other skills to boards. Some charitable organisations get some subvention from the State, some are nearly totally dependent on State support and others get no money from the State and are totally depending on raising money in other ways. The vast majority of employees of charitable organisations are not on high salaries, are probably earning less money than they would in the private sector doing the same job with the same responsibilities, and in many cases they work very long hours and are passionately dedicated to the work they are doing. There are a few bad apples in the barrel and we must be very responsible and careful in this House not to destroy the people's general trust in the charities that they support which, in the main, give very good value for money to this State.

The Minister could do nothing about what happened before his time but much of the controversy of the last few months could have been minimised had he introduced the charities regulator and brought in proper change. Had he done so, we could have stood up and said that was then and this is now, and that if people give money this Christmas it is not being given under the ancien régime but under a new regime with a proper regulator who is accounting for the money under an Act we brought in as Members of this Oireachtas. I welcome the Minister's belated conversion to introducing a charities regulator. I hope he does it swiftly and that by the end of this year we will be able to say we have a properly regulated charities sector in this country. It will not eliminate all risk of cheating. Nothing ever will. No law or regulation will ever do that, but it will make it much less likely and make for much higher standards, greater transparency and greater certainty than in the past.

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