Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)
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209. To ask the Minister for Finance if he will provide a list of all organisations here which are granted charitable tax exemption; if he will list all such organisations which had charitable tax exemption removed in the past ten years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [22716/13]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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In order to qualify for a charitable tax exemption, a body or trust must be established for charitable purposes only and must apply all of its income to those purposes. Procedures are in place to firstly ensure that the exemption is only granted to bodies that meet the necessary criteria and to secondly satisfy the Revenue Commissioners of continued compliance with the terms of the exemption. A list of bodies that have a charitable tax exemption is available on the Revenue Commissioners web site www.revenue.ie at the following link:http://www.revenue.ie/en/about/publications/charities_alpha.xls.

For reasons of taxpayer confidentiality the Revenue Commissioners cannot provide a list of the individual bodies that have had an exemption removed in the past 10 years. However, the following table details the number of such bodies:

A charitable tax exemption can be removed for a variety of reasons such as cessation of activities, amalgamation of two charities or failure to comply with the terms of the charitable tax exemption. The high number of withdrawals in 2008, 2009 and 2010 was due to an intensive exercise carried out during those years to ensure that only those charities that were still active and required a charitable tax exemption retained that exemption.