John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail)

These amendments have been grouped as they relate to charitable trusts. While it is unlikely there are many, if any, single trustee charities, on the basis of legal advice, amendment No. 2 amends the definition of body to cater for such a scenario.

Amendments Nos. 3 and 4 are technical amendments. They provide for necessary redefinitions of charitable organisations and trusts arising from section 88, which allows for charitable organisations to enter into certain agreements with charity trustees or connected persons that would have been contrary to the previous definition.

Amendment No. 65 emerged from interdepartmental consultations relating to how a charity might act on dissolution. A fundamental principle of the Bill as currently drafted is that a charity should apply all of its property for the stated charitable purpose, even when the charity is dissolved. In the course of this consultation, the possibility emerged that some charities might not be bound under their constitutions on dissolution to distribute the remaining property to the charitable purposes. Under these two amendments, which address the potential loophole, any such charity would have to obtain the consent of the authority to pay any of the property to members of the charity on dissolution of that charity.

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