Denis Landy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and hope she enjoyed her summer break. I would also like to welcome our guests.

As other speakers have said, charitable organisations do fantastic work in this country and have been doing so for years. We have all bought into the concept of charity work. Personally, I have been involved in various organisations since I was a child. Unlike Senator Whelan, I even had my head shaved for charity on one occasion. There is anecdotal evidence, however, that charities are setting up overnight, functioning for very short periods of time and disappearing again without any accountability or governance.

I wish to focus on the area of voluntary housing and its charitable status. Currently there are 700 voluntary housing bodies in this country which have, so far, built 25,000 housing units. These bodies have overseen housing developments of between 20 and 3,000 units. In 2012, funding for capital schemes was €70.7 million, which is a serious amount of money in one year. The figures for annual rental from the tenants of these voluntary housing units are not known. That is an area of governance that concerns me greatly.

Many of these organisations are limited companies with charitable status but we need to put a regulatory framework in place for this sector. Any regulation is voluntary. This situation must be improved. In March this year, Deputy Bernard Durkan raised the issue of governance with the Minister of State at the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, in the Lower House. Her response on that occasion was that efforts were afoot to develop key governance and management structures to facilitate the expansion of the remit of these organisations and to provide independent scrutiny and validation of such bodies and their competences.

A voluntary survey was carried out in 2009 of all of the voluntary housing bodies in the country for the purpose of examining the governance structures that were in place at the time but, unfortunately, only 18% of the organisations participated. That survey showed that there were high levels of corporate governance in relation to meeting procedures, the appointment of directors, the preparation of accounts and so forth. However, there was also evidence, in some cases, of infrequent meetings and poor information flow to the directors and trustees which did not assist them in making proper decisions within the organisations. Obviously, there is great scope for supervision of this sector in terms of good governance and so forth.

As outlined by previous speakers, the implementation of the legislation that was enacted originally by a Fianna Fáil Government in 2009 is essential. Senator Whelan has suggested that perhaps we are being penny-wise and pound-foolish in this instance. I fully support that view. There has been much negative commentary in some quarters about the Croke Park agreement but that agreement has been positive on a number of fronts. It has shown the ability of public sector workers to work more efficiently with fewer people, to save money, to transfer from one section to another and so forth. The agreement has shown that many things can be done despite the massive decrease in the number of public sector staff. Surely it would not be beyond the scope of the current Government to find some mechanism within the Croke Park agreement to free up staff in order to set up the regulatory body that is necessary to ensure the implementation of the legislation.

I commend my colleagues, Senators Higgins and Whelan, for initiating this motion within the Labour Party group and I am happy to support it fully. I have a specific interest in the voluntary housing sector and am grateful for the opportunity to discuss it here. I hope the Minister of State will bring the message from here to the line Minister involved that we want to see the legislation implemented as soon as possible.