Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming before the committee today and for the meeting we had recently to go through a lot of the amendments. It is very helpful to get that deeper understanding of where the charities are coming from.

There are three words: it must be transparent, fair and proportionate. If we can get those right it will be a really good Bill. That is what we are working towards. This really helps to get that stage.

I am involved in boards and have been involved in boards for many years. If boards are to spend their time thinking about what could possibly happen as a significant event that we would have to report, it would just cripple the boards, it would cripple conversation and cripple the agendas because boards would literally just be talking about what could potentially happen in the future that board members are personally responsible for. People go onto boards and get involved in community organisations because they want to help and to support their communities, whatever their interest may be.

I am interested in the name change scenario. We were only chatting about this yesterday. I am on the board of a community drug team. We have changed our name from a local organisation to being the Dublin 15 Community Drugs Team. For us that was a really simple thing to do because we had been asked by the HSE to broaden the area that we cover. If we had the conversation about this, about what the implication would be if we changed our name, we would have to report that. It is just a simple thing where one agency is telling us that we must do this because now we are covering a bigger area, but the Charities Regulator could possibly sanction us for changing the name because we did not tell them.

There is a lot of good stuff in the legislation but I believe there needs to be a series of amendments to it. The point about the hammer cracking the nut is a very important one. We must understand that while there are very large organisations with huge resources, their own legal teams, chief executive officers and chief financial officers, then there are organisations like ourselves that have a co-ordinator. That person must manage staff. He or she must manage budgets and the board, get ready for board meetings, and do the day-to-day stuff, including clinical supervision. There is a list of things that this person has to do. If we overburden this person with more and more regulation, the chilling effect would have a real impact on trying to encourage people to come into the community and voluntary sector. This is from an employee perspective. It would be even more difficult, and it is more difficult, from a board of management perspective when one is trying to encourage people to get involved in boards.

I am involved in the compliance and governance part of the board. There are reams and reams of documents involving, for example, the HSE and Tusla. It is endless. There could be 30 or 40 documents that one must then present as part of the service level agreement at the end of the year, for example to the HSE, if the funding is from the HSE. The organisation must go through all of those and all of the staff must understand them. It is fine: I understand that this is part of the environment and all of those are there because of learned experiences and because something has happened, which means that we must put this sort of compliance in place. We must, however, be very careful that we do it in a way that is supportive and so it is not something that is going to put people off. This is very important.

A lot of the stuff I wanted to talk about has been covered and I will not go over it again. There is one aspect that I find a little bit difficult, which is head 29 and personally connected people. For me this is a difficult one. I can understand where it is coming from because in the context of charities, you do not want nepotism going around or the giving of contracts to people in a process that may not be as open and transparent as it possibly could be. We need to tease that aspect out. I am still a little fuzzy about that part. It is the only part I would look at now because a lot of other points have been covered so far.