Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

People's ordinary concept of a charity involves an organisation or society designed to give support or relief of distress or, for instance, to provide services for a hospice, a hospital, schools, for people here in Ireland, refugees or for people in the developing world. We all know what is the ordinary concept of charity. We are not asking the Minister to have an exact answer now. Words have meaning. This is a vehicle. It must be remembered in the United States that one has the common practice of wealthy people turning over vast amounts of their funds to their charity. In many cases, they do vast work. In other cases, the American tax revenue services would be deeply unhappy with them because they are avoidance and mitigation vehicles used against paying tax.

We are part of the OECD process. As a Minister, I supported that strongly. In a globalised world, one has to have structures which are responsive and able to deal with the globalised situation. That is why I have worked with the OECD, as has the Minister for Finance. It may be appropriate to bring in somebody like Pascal Saint-Amans from the OECD to have a look at this from a globalised point of view.

It is important for our society that we maintain the integrity of charitable status. We have had a situation in recent years where there have been various scandals in different charities around how resources were used. We would lose something valuable as a society if we were to let go of the idea of a charity being what is the ordinary Irish meaning of charity. We all know there can be rogue developments or people who do not live up to the standards of integrity required. The majority of charities in Ireland, however, do a vast amount of good.

People pay large fees to the partners in large law and accounting firms who provide this kind of avoidance and mitigation advice. They probably command between €600 and €2,500 an hour. It is big business. We have to find a way of separating the two.

Those who do charity work for Temple Street Children's Hospital and Crumlin Children's Hospital. They are out in the rain and so forth doing fund-raising activities. Both are hospitals with which many of us have been associated all our lives, whether as patients or parents. It is a good example that it should not be possible to use it for another purpose so that the status of the charities is brought down, trivialised or reputationally damaged in society.

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