Ms Madeleine Delaney:

The vast majority of the very important work of dealing with applications for registration and with the concerns that come in - and indeed that is done in the early stages of processing applications under the charity services Act, which is done at the EO grade - is basically our own training of those people. We are very lucky that we have some really good people that we are managing to retain for a particular time. An accountancy background is another important aspect and there are a number of accountants in the organisation. The director himself is an accountant on the compliance and enforcement side. The one area we realised we needed a bit more support in - and hopefully we are at the start of getting that support - is on the legal side. There is quite a lot of law underpinning much of this, even back before the Charities Act, because it is informed by the common law and the cases that were there before that. There is also the charity services work, which is to do with trusts and properties and all of that.

We need to have enough internal resources to help the others to do their job. We have identified that. It is not something you can buy in. Somebody can help externally to defend proceedings or bring proceedings. However, we need our knowledge and understanding internally to be able to carry out our job effectively. They are two particular areas that we need.

We also have quite a demand on our communications function because we, quite rightly, get a lot of queries from the Oireachtas. We have a dedicated Oireachtas email address. We get a lot of email queries and representative queries and also an awful lot of queries from the public. That is a very important part of what we do. In fact, we are realising we probably need to do more on that because there are many matters that people need to understand and things that need to be explained to them. We do it all day every day and we have to remember that other people do not. We need to do a lot more with explaining and reinforcing our messaging.