Results 1-20 of 1,127,678 for in 'Dáil debates' OR (speaker:Tom Kitt OR speaker:Paul Donnelly OR speaker:Pa Daly OR speaker:Martin Browne OR speaker:John Lahart OR speaker:Gary Gannon OR speaker:Mary Butler OR speaker:Catherine Martin OR speaker:Roderic O'Gorman OR speaker:Heather Humphreys OR speaker:Jennifer Whitmore OR speaker:Helen McEntee OR speaker:Marc MacSharry OR speaker:Jennifer Carroll MacNeill OR speaker:Pippa Hackett OR speaker:Michael Healy-Rae OR speaker:Dessie Ellis OR speaker:Brian Leddin OR speaker:Seán Ó Fearghaíl OR speaker:Imelda Munster OR speaker:Michael Lowry OR speaker:Brendan Griffin OR speaker:Alan Dillon OR speaker:Denis Naughten OR speaker:Stephen Donnelly OR speaker:Ivana Bacik OR speaker:Cian O'Callaghan OR speaker:Hildegarde Naughton OR speaker:Marian Harkin OR speaker:Ruairi Ó Murchú OR speaker:Pádraig O'Sullivan OR speaker:Ciarán Cannon OR speaker:Gino Kenny OR speaker:Martin Heydon OR speaker:Seán Haughey OR speaker:Catherine Connolly OR speaker:Anne Rabbitte OR speaker:Seán Crowe OR speaker:Martin Kenny OR speaker:Jack Chambers OR speaker:Neale Richmond) in 'Committee meetings'

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: I know the work is ongoing and they are being considered. I do not have precise numbers but a recommendation comes to me for either a removal or a prosecution.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Marc Ó Cathasaigh: This is an unusual question for the committee but is the regulator under-resourced in that area? I am surprised the regulator has only one dedicated staff member working on this.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: We had one dedicated staff member who was doing that. We have sought and been granted approval, in principle, for another dedicated legal adviser to do that. We were able to do the work by doing it in-house for less than €10,000 for the eight prosecutions.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Marc Ó Cathasaigh: That is very good. I will ask a very big question in two minutes and I do not suppose we will get to the bottom of it. Approved housing bodies are becoming a bigger part of housing provision and they are going to become difficult. There are encumbered assets with loans against them. There are unencumbered assets where some of these houses are being bought through fund-raising and have no...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: That cohort of the sector is particularly complicated and troublesome. There are 438 approved housing bodies.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Marc Ó Cathasaigh: Is it open to AHBs to change from charitable status? One of my concerns is that AHBs with charitable status may decide to change their status, which would lead to a complicated question about assets.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: No, it should not be as in their governing document says what they have to do. Again when we are looking at them as part of the registration process, we look at what we call "key standard clauses" to see that they have them, which locks in the property for the charitable purpose. They cannot just stop being a charity and decide to do something else. That is how it...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Marc Ó Cathasaigh: Has the regulator the power to retrospectively make sure the clauses are in place?

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: This is something that we need to do. We will work more closely with the Approving Housing Bodies Regulator on this because it is obviously aware of the connection. We need to start identifying the different cohorts and the AHBR will have more information than we do. That will help us identify ones where maybe we can look at them and check the status of their...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Catherine Murphy: I thank Ms Delaney for answering. It was a very big question that took up two minutes.I have no doubt we will come back to this matter, including for the benefit of myself. I suggest that Deputy O'Connor makes his contribution before we take a break.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

James O'Connor: I welcome all the witnesses. The Peter McVerry Trust is in the headlines for the wrong reasons, which has prompted a lot of questions that need to be answered around what merits the Charities Regulator getting involved to undertake investigative work. Under Part IV of the Charities Act 2009, the Charities Regulator has the power to appoint investigators to investigate the affairs of any...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: We can initiate investigations in our own right. We do not need to have received a complaint in order to do that.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

James O'Connor: In how many instances has that happened? As the Peter McVerry Trust grew between 2011 and 2022, I understand that it took over nine separate charities. The trust’s remit is supposed to be housing and homelessness, but the purpose of one of those charities was the advancement of religion, which is not one of the trust’s charitable purposes. The trust is in receipt of...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: Investigation and the appointment of inspectors is the thin end of our powers and we do not use it in all cases, which is why there have been so few investigations overall. The bulk of our activity is done on a one-to-one basis with the charities without appointing inspectors where we can get the information asses it and sort out the issues, and the charities are...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

James O'Connor: An approximate figure is okay.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: We can come back to the Deputy after the break on that.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

James O'Connor: The reason I ask is there is a lot of grime on the window of the immigrant investor programme, IIP, which I am concerned about. Nobody is quite sure why it was shut down. A number of charities were involved in the process of obtaining it. There are multiple reasons - "issues occurred" and pressure from the European Commission and other aspects at an international level but looking at the...

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: I am not aware of any specific concerns raised about the investor programme itself but I will check for the Deputy and come back to him after the break. We looked at perhaps two or three charities - I will come back with a figure - which might have had some funding from that programme but that was not necessarily specifically what we were looking at.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

James O'Connor: Will Ms Delaney elaborate on that? She said it was not something the Charities Regulator was specifically looking at.

Public Accounts Committee: Financial Statements 2023 - Charities Regulatory Authority (17 Oct 2024)

Ms Madeleine Delaney: It might just have been coincidental, if you like, that they had that funding. The complaint we had was not about the funding or that might not have been the issue.