Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is curious. What I found strange about it was that in May 2018, when then Minister for Finance and Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, launched the Benefacts second analysis report at the Royal Irish Academy, he expressed the admiration and support he and his Department had for the Benefacts project. He stated that he was willing to say he believed the output was crucial and the key thing was that all of this was possible only because Benefacts had done a huge volume of work to assemble all the information that is needed regarding what is happening in the non-profit sector, including the sources of income, the scale of the sector and the output that the sector generates. He went on to say that what Benefacts allowed us to do was bring a fact-based approach to understanding how that money is used, what the totality of funding was, what the disclosure levels in the organisations were and who were the recipients of that funding. I found that incredible. We know from the earlier hearings on this that the benefits of this database were immense.