John Crown (Independent)

The Minister should encourage the culture and philosophy of the charitable sector within his Department, which would have the same aims of most charities. Before making some general points, I would like to make one specific point. It is probably not widely known that virtually all the clinical medical research which takes place in this country is undertaken voluntarily. Almost no doctors are paid as part of their contract to do medical research. Most of those who do research, do so on an entirely voluntary basis and during family rather than practise time. This can have huge benefits, namely, medical research makes treatment better, patients on medical research programmes tend to get better treatment than do patients getting equivalent treatments off-programme because of the added discipline and rigour of taking part in a research study. Also, it has the potential to bring in huge amounts of investment.

I have run several medical research focused charities over the years. Without going into all the details, I believe, on the back of an envelope calculation, that they have generated approximately 200 jobs and have brought millions of euros into the country. More important, they have resulted in the availability for our people of millions of euros of drugs that would otherwise not have been available.

While the Department of Justice and Equality is responsible for ensuring everything is done by the book, it is important the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government attempts to grease the wheels to ensure there is a facilitation of the research process. There are many people who will donate money to charities, charities which have many beneficial social aims. These people may be happier to donate to a charity than to Government which may use it to pay off bondholders, public relations contracts or other functions which they would believe to be less socially rewarding.

The issue of charities being forced to pay VAT on their purchases needs to be addressed. It is wholly illogical that companies can in respect of commercial purposes write off expenses while charities cannot. I strongly encourage the notion of work fare, as outlined by Senator Quinn to whom I am grateful for sharing his time with me. People are, through no fault of their own for the most part, unemployed. There are many unemployed people in receipt of a degree of benefit who would like to contribute to society. The charities with which I am involved have calculated that with ten, 20 or 30 hours of voluntary work their costs could be overcome. I ask that the Minister keep an eye on the charities ball.