Mr. Francis Doherty:

I thank the committee for the invitation to meet its members today. I was the CEO of the Peter McVerry Trust, PMVT, from 1 June to 13 October 2023. Prior to becoming CEO, I had worked at the trust for a decade, initially in junior and mid-level communications roles before becoming director of housing development and communications in December 2020.

On the face of it, the trust was a hugely successful and innovative organisation. It had 1,000 properties, it ran services in the areas of homelessness, addiction, ex-prisoners, children’s care, schools, education, housing and housing first, asylum seekers and Ukrainian supports. It had an annual budget of just over €60 million; it supported over 2,000 people every night. The trust played a crucial role in addressing some of the most challenging issues in our society. This important work was delivered by over 700 staff. I want to take a moment to recognise what a privilege it was to work with so many talented and committed colleagues. These were people focused on doing their best every day in what were often very challenging circumstances. For many of us, the trust was more than a job. We were deeply committed to the trust’s purpose and proud to work in the name of its founder, Fr. Peter McVerry.

We worked for a charity that appeared to be in good stead. The trust was under the financial oversight of, and audited annually by, its numerous statutory funders. These included the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, DRHE, the HSE, Tusla and many local authorities. The trust was also regulated by two statutory regulators: the Charities Regulator and, since 2021, the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority, AHBRA. The board of the PMVT made annual returns to the Charities Regulator. Each year, the statutory returns stated the trust was compliant with all aspects of the charity governance code. AHBRA, in its pilot assessment programme in March 2023, indicated the trust was deemed "compliant with improvements" in the areas of governance, finance, asset management and tenancy engagement.

As incoming CEO, I was invited to observe the trust’s annual general meeting on the 11 May 2023. I was advised by the board that "the organisation could not be handed over to you in better financial health", and it was noted that the outgoing CEO had secured 18 years of "clean audits". It is important to note that, for his entire 18 years, finances were the remit of the long-term CEO, as agreed by the board, without segregation of duties or devolution of budget responsibilities to directors of service. The board was comprised of a chair who had worked closely with the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation on drafting the Companies Act 2014 and who chaired, and continues to chair, the Irish Blood Transfusion Service, IBTS, the statutory body with responsibility for the national blood supply, as well as senior executives at VHI and FBD, a former DRHE employee, senior legal professionals and a hugely successful entrepreneur.

It became clear within weeks that the board’s representation of the charity’s financial state could not have been further from the truth. The finances and financial systems were in such a poor state that with each passing day it became clear that it was verging on total collapse. On the day I became CEO, I would later learn, the charity’s trade creditors were owed more than €9.6 million, an additional €6 million was owed to Revenue and almost €2 million was owed to the banks, while the organisation had just €437,000 across all of its bank accounts. The organisation had zero cash reserves and €125 in a sinking fund. All restricted fundraising and grant income for specific purpose use had been spent when there should have been more than €5 million in restricted bank accounts on the back of purpose-specific donations.

The charity was haemorrhaging cash after a decade of securing new homeless services by bidding substantially less than the actual costs to run the services, meaning that pretty much every service the trust provided was running a substantial deficit, apart perhaps from Tusla- and IPAS-related work. The scale of the financial chaos I inherited is illustrated by the fact that even with the involvement of the Department of housing, DRHE, PwC, Crowe Ireland, a new board, new external auditors and additional finance staff, it has been over two years and the finances are still not fully understood or resolved.

This was more than bad financial management. It was also an oversight and governance failure that brought the charity to the brink of collapse, exposing the 2,000 people in the trust’s care to a very real risk of services closing. Yet it seems those with legal responsibility for ensuring the appropriate use of the charity’s resources have been able to avoid any accountability. How is it that the board of a charity with a budget of €61 million had never seen or asked to see a cash flow projection? How could anyone take confidence from a board that stated it had no idea of a revenue warehousing debt of €8.3 million when the liability was referenced in the 2020, 2021 and 2022 accounts? How does a board remain credible when in mid-August 2023, weeks after the finance and governance failings had been laid bare to the board, it wrote to the Charities Regulator stating the charity was fully compliant with the charity governance code? Clearly, this was not the case.

Why did the Charities Regulator not use its powers to appoint independent trustees to help to protect the services, service users and staff? If not then, perhaps the Charities Regulator might have intervened directly when the regulator was provided with a copy of a letter from the trust’s chairperson, on behalf of the trustees, explicitly prohibiting me as CEO from communicating freely and transparently with stakeholders, including the regulatory bodies. Perhaps the Charities Regulator might have acted following the publication of the restated accounts for 2022, published in November 2023, that incorrectly stated the charity had €47.3 million in "unrestricted reserves". As committee members will know, unrestricted reserves are funds that the charity’s trustees can use at their discretion to further any of the charity’s purposes. This was obviously not the situation and should, at the very least, have raised another red flag about the board’s financial competency.

The extraordinary efforts that my team and I made to keep the trust operational across the summer of 2023 were parallelled by a board that seemed to transition from ignorance to self-preservation. Long-standing small-scale creditors turned up at our offices desperate to be paid to keep their own businesses afloat.

The chair of the board wrote to me with specific directions on who should be paid first, and it was not the agencies who provided the staff we relied upon to keep our services running or the contractors working to rectify fire safety issues that are being covered, but two companies recently engaged to provide legal and PR advice to help the board navigate the crisis. The board of the trust prioritised self-interest over the best interests of the charity, put staff and service users at risk and made my and my staff's efforts to act in the charity's best interest so much more challenging. I am in no doubt that were it not for the course of action and decisions I made over those days and months, the Peter McVerry Trust would have collapsed, with disastrous consequences for 2,000 people who relied on the organisation for support, the 700 people it employed and their families, and the huge number of creditors.

Finally, I formally acknowledge the support of my wife, my daughters, parents, family, friends and colleagues through all of this, as well as the many people who contacted me with messages of support following my resignation from the Peter McVerry Trust in October 2023.