Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I thank all the witnesses for their opening statements. Most of the public commentary on the crisis in the Peter McVerry Trust has focused on the trust and things that the trust and individuals on the board of the executive did wrong. That is as it should be, but there is a wider context and it is important that this committee examines it.

While none of what I am going to say in any way excuses what was clearly inappropriate behaviour by individuals within the organisation, there are aspects of the financial framework within which they were working that certainly enabled some of that very bad behaviour. We know, for example, that the Peter McVerry Trust secured a housing first tender in Dublin in 2019. The full economic cost of that was about €16.4 million but the successful tender was only for €6.4 million, which means the trust was awarded a contract for which it underbid to the tune of €10 million. That is a phenomenal gap. That is not deficit funding in the realm of having to fundraise an extra 10%. The trust was essentially saying to the DRHE, the contracting party, but ultimately to the Department, that it could deliver that service for 39% of the full economic cost. The following year, in 2020, the four chief executives of the other large homeless service providers wrote to the then Minister saying they were very concerned with many aspects of the funding model, including deficit funding, for the financial viability of the sector. A review of that funding model was promised but only commenced following the near-collapse of the Peter McVerry Trust.

My initial questions are to the Department. How did nobody stop to think that there was a problem if a body was being awarded a tender and was offering to fund it at 40% of the cost? Why did the genuine concerns set out in two letters to the Minister and the Department, and subsequently discussed in meetings between the chief executives and some of Ms Tobin's colleagues in the Department in 2020, 2021 and 2022, not raise red flags about what was going on in the Peter McVerry Trust well before that organisation almost went bankrupt in the summer of 2023? What has now changed in terms of those key issues at a departmental level filtering through to the DRHE to ensure that the problems that arose then could not arise again and if they did, they would be spotted at a much earlier stage?