Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is good to see the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, in the House. The charities legislation has had an outrageous historical journey and this has been going on since the mid-1990s. The Department of Justice and Equality sat on it for years, it next arrived at other Departments and it then came back to the Department of Justice and Equality. The Bill has been around since the 2000s and has been a very long time in gestation. It was passed nearly ten years ago but was not implemented. I have always felt, certainly in the last five years when I was here in the Seanad, that when we enact legislation there is a presumption that once it appears on the Statute Book, it will at least become effective. In this case, large and vital sections of the Bill remain inactive and important powers are denied.

I do not want to go into the background of Console. It is possibly the worst of all scandals because an organisation like Console murders hope in the people who placed such hope in this organisation. Of course, it is the people at the head of it, not those who work in it, who murder that hope and abandon the sense of the humane in themselves.

Recent scandals in the charity sector have been allowed to snowball because the essential legislative sections have been left uncommenced and under-resourced.Part 4 is the most important one. Was it about resources? The official explanation was that insufficient resources were given to the regulator. He was understaffed and, therefore, without power. If that is the case, maybe we could allow charities to pay a very small levy to fund the regulatory activity? If one transfers, as we did, all the functions of the Attorney General to the Charities Regulatory Authority, one must also transfer all the machinery and powers.

The Minister intends to commence Part 4 in September, namely, the regulator's investigative powers to seize documents, enter premises, to suspend trustees and to have what we would call a full set of teeth when needed, so that reputational damage, like what happened with Console, will not occur again. Will the Minister outline what additional resources she intends to put in place so that the regulator has all he needs? Will the Minister indicate why Part 4 cannot be commenced before the recess? Why must we wait until September since it is already there? Why must we always wait for a massive problem to arise before we do something about it? In more instances than one, it is too late. It is too late for the greed of some, which we have witnessed, and for the fractured fragility of the victims. Will the Minister please answer those questions? The regulator needs the powers now as well as the additional resources. What are those additional resources? I want to have confidence in respect of the additional resources but I also want to have confidence in the explanation as to why Part 4 cannot be commenced now rather than in September. I thank the Minister very much for taking the time to be here.