Ms Alice Murphy:

Charity regulation in Ireland is reasonably young and new. Historically, those of us involved in charities going back a long time remember when the Revenue Commissioners used to set some rules. A proper statutory framework for the regulation of charities only came in with the Charities Act 2009, which was only brought into law on 16 October 2014. We have approximately eight years of charity regulation here. I believe our regulator has leaned on the older legislative regimes in common law jurisdictions. We often look to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.

With regard to a friendly, supportive and meaningful regulatory framework that is of assistance to charities in keeping themselves going, the presence of guidance is very useful in addition to primary legislation. It is my view that primary legislation can only go so far in tackling what the Chair is speaking about with regard to the approach. We will never nail culture and approach in primary legislation. We can go an awful lot further in the establishment of a supportive framework through soft law instruments such as guidance. An example is the regulator's website stating a charity can come to it. The Scottish regulator does well on this front. The Charity Commission for England and Wales is an equally good benchmark with a more established regime.

Our regulator has gone a huge way in the past two or three years in the production of guidance to help trustees. I would venture to suggest that whether a given regulator operates as a police officer or as a supportive oversight body will probably not come down to the words on the page of the Act. Naturally, we adopt Deputy Donnelly's transparent, fair and proportionate approach. In a review of the legislation, we should certainly remove provisions that are clearly disproportionate and clearly unreasonable. With the best will in the world, in the development of the legislative framework, we must rely on the regulator and the office of the regulator to take the legislation and interpret it in a fair and supportive way rather than taking the legislation and deciding it now has three powers and coming down hard on every minor issue that comes on the desk. It has to be led by the regulator's office.