Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 November 2025

Public Accounts Committee

Exceptional Funding of the Peter McVerry Trust: Discussion

2:00 am

Mr. Fergal O'Leary:

We monitor 431 AHBs. They are required to fill in a form, depending on their size, every year and send that to us. We then test the information in that form against peers and their previous returns to basically look for red flags. That is the monitoring programme.

If I may, because it is an important point, a lot of the work in 2021 was about developing the standards we now use. We have four standards which AHBs are responsible for compliance with. That was a difficult task because it is such a diverse group of AHBs that they needed to be done in a particular way so that everybody could be compliant, to go back to some of the questions earlier about small AHBs and the difficulties they can have. That is what we were doing. The time was well spent, I can promise the Deputy that.