Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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Can I just stop Ms Hurley there please? The role of Benefacts was not to provide greater transparency. In fact, the Charities Bill was enacted in 2009 and the Charities Regulator began its operations in 2014 but Benefacts actually only commenced around that time so it was not going to duplicate that.

If we look at the administration of each Department, one of my criticisms is that there is a silo-based approach in many areas. This is not a blanket criticism because there is a lot of good work being done in the Departments but there can be a very silo-based approach. There can be duplication in administration. We are looking here at systems that can overcome that, that can be cross-departmental and that can cut down on administration whereby things do not have to be duplicated. Benefacts provided that but what the Department is going to build is probably going to be in addition to that, if it gets built. That cross-departmental overview and reduction in administration is going to be lost because no Department took Benefacts on board. This was updated daily.

The report states that 160 public sector bodies in Ireland were providing more than €7 billion in financial supports to at least 4,000 non-profit organisations. Notwithstanding this high level of financial commitment distributed across so many individual agencies, each with its own administrative and accountability structures for grant-making, there has until recently been "no mechanism for inter-agency data sharing". There is certainly no mechanism anymore because the Benefacts system has been dispensed with.

I ask Ms Hurley to provide any available minutes of meetings or engagements with the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform on this. What did such engagements consist of, in terms of the depth of knowledge that the Departments have in dispensing with this system, irrespective of who ran it?