Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for bringing forward the Bill. Sinn Féin supports its overall purpose and I will address some of the issues that have been brought forward during the pre-legislative process and identified by others. I found the pre-legislative process and the committee meetings very useful. I thank everyone who engaged with them, including the Charities Regulator, the ICCL and the members.

First, we need to remind ourselves why we are doing this and to look at the massively important work being done by charities throughout the island of Ireland. These include those working in healthcare, drug services, homelessness, housing services, rehabilitation, recovery, and providing food and other basic needs to anyone and everyone in our communities. Many of these community and voluntary organisations grew out of a failure of the State to provide for the basic needs of our citizens. I would like to give an example of one of those that is close to my heart, Aoibheann's Pink Tie. Aoibheann was a beautiful young girl who was diagnosed with cancer. Her father, Jimmy Norman, who is a friend of mine, along with his family, spent night and day in St. John’s oncology ward in Crumlin. It was during the dark days of the economic crisis and money was tight for all the families in St. John’s ward. One of the nastiest cuts that happened during that period was to a discretionary fund that had been distributed by social workers in the hospital. Not having that left people without even money to pay for parking spaces or food. Jimmy saw the need and I was there for the very first night of the charity when we organised a fundraiser. It has grown into a fantastic charity which looks after the needs of families and children in St. John’s ward and children with cancer. It is opening a second new home for families to be able to stay overnight beside Crumlin hospital where accommodation was dreadful. We need to show examples of what people are doing in our communities day to day and what we need to do to help and support them.

Unfortunately, we have also had some bad examples of charities which have abused people’s trust, and this has weakened people’s trust in all charities. It is something we need to work hard on to change. This legislation is part of that work. That is why we need a strong regulator that has the powers to ensure greater transparency, clarity and fairness to enhance public confidence. It is important we have strong regulation and we also need to ensure charities, the vast majority of which are small and medium sized-organisations, many funded by the State, have the ability to deal with the ever-increasing regulations and legislation. We must always seek to strike a balance. One big issue that has caused huge frustration is the ability of people to claim they are charities. We will all have had experience of door-to-door collections, an issue I have raised, as have others, and how people believe these are charities. The Bill would ensure it would be an offence to present as a charity in promotional literature, advertisements or notices. I concur with the Minister of State that if anyone knows of anyone who is purporting to be a charity, they should contact the Charity Regulator on that. People should certainly be very careful when they are donating to what purport to be charities but that may not be registered.

During pre-legislative scrutiny we raised a concern about fundraising on social media and other sites such as GoFundMe. I would like to see this addressed in some way as it is completely unregulated and open to serious abuse and fraud. I would hope that the section that seeks to consolidate existing legislation in relation to offences committed by individuals or groups purporting to be charities or such moneys raised through crowdfunding means it is covered in some way and that we look at that. Part of our recommendation was that we would continue to look at this. I hope that is something the Minister will take on board. The Department states this is currently a small part of fundraising but it also acknowledges that it may change into the future. Surely we should be future-proofing as much as we can in this Bill. We all know the power of social media. Look at the media organisations and another 50 people being laid off. We are seeing a complete change in how people interact and communicate. This is one area that definitely needs some attention.

I am pleased the threshold after which charities must produce accounts has been increased to €25,000. This will benefit up to 744 of those really small charities. They may have an administrator or secretary who is paid full time to do the regulatory-type work and administration. It is also very welcome that the level at which there is a need for an audit is increasing from €100,000 to €250,000. That means a further 1,000 charities will benefit from this change and it is very welcome.

I would like to raise the issue of the wording “significant event”, something which took up substantial time in committee. It is an event or situation that places a charitable organisation or its reputation at significant risk.

I am still really not sure about paragraph (c) in particular. It is very much open to interpretation and could lead to a surge in reporting to the Charities Regulator by charities that are nervous about this section. It could possibly take up an enormous amount of board time and energy. I am a member of a board, and there are probably a lot of us here who are voluntary members of boards, and we joined the boards so that there would be the charity or service we would like to see provided in our communities. However, we see a huge amount of time being taken up with governance. While that is fine in that it is needed and is there for a reason, I still think the wording of that, particularly paragraph (c), just gives too much scope to cause problems for boards and the definition of what significant would be. I envisage there will still be problems regarding that.

There are now a significant number of charities that are companies limited by guarantee, CLGs, and they have another set of governance regulations to follow. Again, this is necessary for confidence. However, we must be careful to strike a balance. My concern would be that it is difficult to attract and retain volunteers, such as members of the community and people with a specific skill set that would be wanted on a board of management. It is difficult to retain them and, as I said earlier, we need to be careful when we put in wording such as "significant event" that we strike a balance.

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, called for the wording to revert to the 2018 guidelines and not the newer 2021 document, which state:

An organisation will be considered to have political purposes if it ... is set up primarily to promote a political cause such as bringing about a change in the law or policies of the Government or other public bodies.

The ICCL states:

We agree that any organisation set up for an exclusively political purpose should not get charitable status. However, it should be open to organisations who have or wish to obtain charitable status to be able to work to advocate politically, to change the laws and to influence policy.

This section is open to interpretation and I would be concerned, along with others, that there should be much more clarity, openness and transparency about the change to the 2018 guidance on this.

Sinn Féin broadly supports the purpose of the Bill and I look forward to working with the Minister to address the issues I and others have raised.

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