Mr. Ivan Cooper:

Just a couple of points worth making, we now have a new charity regulator up and running here. This provides an opportunity to build on the point just made by Dr. Breen in regard to the United Kingdom's Charity Commission guidance on advocacy. The charities regulator will turn shortly to developing Irish guidance on advocacy activity in order to provide a similar sense of reassurance to organisations on how they should approach their advocacy activity. The committee should be aware of the opportunity to contribute to that. Then, in due course we will have the review of the Charities Act and the committee could make a recommendation and put forward a straightforward amendment for the inclusion of advocacy for human rights as a charitable purpose.

I would, however, make an observation. On the face of it, the reason the promotion of human rights is not a charitable purpose is that when the Act was enacted, it was deemed to be an Act that effectively reflected current practice. That was the idea and it was not about creating new charitable purposes that had not already been recognised. Therefore, somewhere along the way, we will be required to engage on the question of whether to take the step to move consciously to include advocacy on human rights as a charitable purpose. We must examine whether the reasons that have been articulated for that move are the reasons we need to be aware of, or whether there is some other reason the promotion of charitable purposes was not included. No effort was spared by a number of organisations to make the recommendation to include it, but it was very difficult to get any answer as to why it was not included, other than the fact that it was never the intention of the Act to be anything other than an Act that reflected the then prevailing approach. More work could be done in this regard.