Mr. Francis Doherty:

Yes, it is a fair contention. To contextualise the extent of that, the Peter McVerry Trust received in the region of €35 million to €36 million from donors over the course of 2018 to 2022 for social housing projects. Those were ring-fenced, specific-use donations from religious orders, other sources and donors. By the end of 2022, the organisation owed €8.3 million to Revenue. Its trade creditor liabilities had tripled over the course of a year. As a result, this huge amount of money that should have been going into capital investment and social housing was actually pulled into operations to mask the long-term strategy, as the Deputy has just outlined. The consequences of that were that the staff on the front line had to do extraordinary things in order to make things run professionally and smoothly, which, to their credit, they did. However, it seems that every quarter the organisation was agreeing to open a new service when it did not have enough staff to run the services it was already operating. When I came in, the first thing I said to the DRHE was that we needed to reduce, by at least one third, the number of homeless beds we provided because of the risk to staff and service users. This was because of the level and vacancy and the fact we could not justify the money we were receiving because it was not actually going into the services it was paying for.