Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Moloney and wish him the best of luck in his new role. I want to focus on two areas, Benefacts and public-private partnerships, PPPs. Benefacts was the only organisation drawing together data from audited financial statements from thousands of non-profits. I think it dealt with somewhere in the region of €7.4 billion and, very often, it would receive funding from multiple sources, sometimes multiple State sources. It was an open access database and was heavily used. It took €250,000 to close it down and this was after €6 million had been spent since 2015, a lot of it State money - public money - and some of it from philanthropy. There is no replacement for it. A resource that was being used has disappeared and that, to me, screams waste of money.

I find it very difficult to figure out what the thinking was, given there was no replacement. The Charities Regulator, for example, would have about 11,000 entities on its books, with 4,000 of those being schools, whereas this particular database contained a much bigger number of entities. We are supposed to be taking an open governance approach. This was very important information. Why was it closed down without even consulting the stakeholders who, I understand, found out through a freedom of information release? Why did that happen?