John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail)

I refer to amendment No. 41. It is not that, as a member of a sports club, I would be unsympathetic to having a more favourable tax regime but this is not the way of doing it. It is a tax law that must be addressed. The Charities Bill makes the distinction between the two separate functions of Revenue and the charity regulator. In this amendment we do not have that.

Senator Hannigan referred to receiving e-mails up to recently. I received the same. I rang a number of people to discuss this, ranging from chief executive officers and directors to development officers on behalf of the organisations. I do not want to put down public consultation but many organisations had not gone into this matter in depth. I spoke to people within organisations and I tried to tease it out to see if we were missing something or if we were causing real problems. I was concerned and I spoke to many people on this.

On the principled basis that a tax advantage might accrue under the taxation system, it is not a sound rationale for inclusion of sporting bodies as charities. Senators have suggested that we include them and then exclude them in five years' time if it is not working out. If we remove the automatic exclusion, every club in the country is obliged to register as a charity. With that would come responsibilities that clubs do not have now. Sporting bodies would be subject to additional regulatory scrutiny and would have reporting requirements they do not have now. We would impose this on them according to their activity. From the range of people I have spoken to, at the moment the primary interest in this legislation is tax.