Ms Helen Martin:

I can answer that more generally because it comes under the charities governance code and the whole area of private benefit. When salaries are paid to the people involved in running charities, that is considered to be a private benefit. The Act provides that the private benefit must be reasonable in all the circumstances, must be ancillary and must be necessary to the furthering of the public benefit that the charity entails. We tell charities they must ensure the amounts of money they pay to members of staff should be benchmarked and should be reasonable. They have to be reasonable and necessary. It is obvious that a charity which provides healthcare services in the home will need nurses. We consider that to be a private benefit which is absolutely required and is permissible under the Charities Act. The charity would have to make sure it is benchmarked against what a nurse would be paid elsewhere. That is where we would come across that. People would be asking about that, and that would be our general advice in this area.

I would like to refer to research that has been done on salaries more generally. We might consider a salary of more than €70,000 to be a high salary for these purposes. Research indicates that less than 1% of the workforce in the not-for-profit sector, which obviously is wider than the charitable sector, is paid more than €70,000. The relevant percentage is much higher in other areas. I believe it is 13% in the rest of the economy. There is certainly a perception out there. We often see it when the results of research come back. People want charities to be well run, but at the same time they do not think people in charities should be paid the same as they might be paid elsewhere. Our view is that a nurse who is working in a charity should be paid the same as a nurse who is working in a hospital, if they are doing the same job.