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By Ciarán Walsh
False non-prophets
Behind the compassion, Ireland’s
non-profi ts are machines to
outsource responsibility for a State
that relies on nonprofi t failure as
much as nonprofi t success
A system built to avoid
responsibility
Ireland’s non-profi t sector receives
extraordinary levels of public money — far
higher than many EU counterparts — yet
transparency has declined just as funding
has grown. Benefacts’ fi nal national analysis
found that nonprofi ts received €6.2 billion
in State grants in 2019, representing 8.1%
of all government spending. Its 2020
estimate was €7.4 billion in itemised State
grants to 2,416 organisations. More recent
independent estimates suggest funding
reached €10.8 billion in 2022, but the loss
of Benefacts’ government funded database
means Ireland no longer has a central
system to track the money. The Charities
Regulator has stepped in to collect this
information and is quickly making more
and more details regarding the fi nancial
accounts and governance of charities
public. Many non-profi ts, such as sports
clubs, are outside its remit, however.
The ’Giving Ireland 2024’ report
estimates that public (state) funding
accounted for 56% of the total turnover of
the nonprofi t (charity) sector, with a few
large organisations (especially in health,
social services, and education) making
up a disproportionate share of that public
funding. From the State’s perspective,
outsourcing a social problem to a nonprofi t
is excellent value for money, as no one
would do it cheaper. State funding gives
the receiving charity an o cial stamp of
approval which is invaluable for soliciting
public and corporate donations.
Worse still, Giving Ireland makes frequent
references to the lack of good-quality
data in its reports. Dennis O’Connor, CEO
of the non-profi t transparency advocacy
group 2into3, recently told The Journal
that the scarcely detailed fi nancial reports
of companies limited by guarantee and
non-profi ts needs to be addressed by
policymakers. He added this is the “biggest
gap” in information for the sector currently.
Because they don’t produce an income or
expenditure report, you cannot see where
their money is coming from.
Common to all charities is the mantra “our
mission is to make ourselves obsolete”.
NGOs mediate between the people and the big state
OPINION
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The public is left with the
impression of episodic
failure, when in fact the
failures are structural and
predictable
However, in the Irish context where funding
is granted on an annual basis only, with
the previous year’s allocation being the
primary factor, nonprofits cannot plan
beyond 12-months nor beyond 20% to 50%
of secured budget – the rest must be found
in the highly competitive ‘donation market.’
This is a reality which puts the charity under
stress to highlight and market the worst of
their social problem brand in order to keep
the show on the road.
Despite the inflated expenditure, the
underlying problems rarely improve.
Charities have become a convenient
substitute for public services: they carry
the blame, absorb public anger, and shield
government from building functioning,
accountable systems. The result is a sector
that survives not because it fixes problems,
but because the problems never go away.
This dynamic is so embedded that many
scandals barely cause a ripple before the
cycle resets. The public is left with the
impression of episodic failure, when in fact
the failures are structural and predictable.
What makes the situation more troubling
is that the scale of public funding gives
the illusion of a functioning system. A
casual observer might assume that €6
billion signals a serious commitment to
social welfare. Instead, the money often
props up fragmented services, duplicated
administration and annual firefighting,
while allowing government to delay
fundamental reforms. This article examines
how Ireland arrived at this point and why
the cycle proves so hard to break.
The daddy of delinquent indulgence
of not-for-profits by the deficient state
was the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes,
founded in 1930, which was long sold as
a patriotic fundraiser for public hospitals,
but investigations later revealed it was
underpinned by systematic corruption.
Much of the enormous revenue—drawn
from international ticket sales—never
reached hospitals. Instead, insiders
enriched themselves through secret
ownership structures, inflated contracts,
and political patronage. By the 1980s the
operation collapsed.
The more recent collapse of the Peter
McVerry Trust in 2023 typifies the problem.
By the time the charity entered eective
financial freefall, it owed €9.6 million to
trade creditors, €6 million to Revenue, and
€2 million to banks, alongside further sta
liabilities, prompting an emergency State
bailout estimated at €15 million.
What appeared sudden was in fact
the culmination of years of unchecked
expansion, weak governance and ignored
internal warnings. Yet the political and
public reaction treated the near-implosion
of Ireland’s largest homelessness
organisation as an unfortunate singular
crisis rather than the predictable
consequence of a funding and oversight
model that routinely produces similar
failures.
So, in 2013, the Central Remedial Clinic
scandal revealed that donated funds —
intended for children with disabilities
— had been diverted to top up senior
executive salaries far above public-service
norms. Public outrage was intense but
short-lived. A year later, in 2014, the Rehab
Group made headlines when it emerged
that its vaunted chief executive Angela
Kerins was earning over €240,000 and that
“Scratch Card” revenues delivered only a
fraction of their implied charitable value.
Again, governance alarms rang, but little
structural change followed.
In 2016, Console collapsed after RTÉ
exposed that its founder had spent nearly
€500,000 of donations on personal luxuries
including foreign travel and designer
goods. The organisation disintegrated, but
its demise did not prompt a rethink of how
mental-health charities are regulated or
funded. Pieta, founded in 2006 and once
Ireland’s fastest-growing mental-health
charity, expanded aggressively during the
2010s on a fundraising-driven model. Its
flagship “Darkness Into Light” event became
a national ritual, generating both money
and media visibility. But the organisation’s
financial base was fragile. A 2021 HSE
audit found its internal financial controls
“unsatisfactory,” noting weaknesses in
oversight, reporting and governance.
Revenue dependence on a single annual
event created radical volatility: in 2020,
Covid-19 forced cancellations, triggering an
immediate financial crisis and mass sta
redundancies.
Pieta’s public visibility masked a
deeper structural issue: its survival relied
on branding, marketing and emotional
appeal rather than sustainable funding
or integrated clinical frameworks. Suicide
prevention itself became an annual
fundraising message—never embedded
within a long-term national mental-health
strategy.
St John of God, whose involvement in
disability and mental-health services dates
back to the 1880s, illustrates another form
of systemic dysfunction. With an annual
budget running into hundreds of millions,
largely drawn from the State, it operates
many services on which thousands of
vulnerable people depend. Yet internal and
external reviews during the 2010s and into
2020 highlighted persistent governance
weaknesses. These included blurred
lines between the religious order and the
executive arm, poor documentation of
decisions, and a board lacking the audit
and financial expertise expected of an
organisation of its scale. Despite receiving
State-level funding, it never received
State-level scrutiny. In eect, the State
outsourced core public services to an entity
that was simultaneously too big to fail and
too opaque to be fully held to account.
The Irish Red Cross, as revealed in
Village Magazine, followed a similar
script. Reports of bullying, high turnover,
NGO rot set in as early as the 1930s
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delayed tsunami-relief disbursements and
persistent governance failures showed
how even a national treasure could operate
behind a veil of State association, political
appointments and minimal consequence.
Even the Irish Horse Welfare Trust,
criticised in 2022 for spending
disproportionate sums on administration
compared with the number of animals it
cared for, briefly occupied headlines before
fading into the same background hum of
unresolved dysfunction.
In truth, they form a continuous pattern:
the same incentives, the same lack of
long-term funding frameworks, the same
absence of State accountability, and the
same charitable dependency on public
sentiment rather than stable policy. When
they falter, the State steps in — not to
reform the system, but to stabilise it just
enough to ensure continuity.
Why Ireland uses charities
instead of public services
The reliance on charities is deliberate. Look
at our schools and hospitals.
Funding a nonprofit is cheaper, politically
safer and more flexible than committing to
rights-based public provision. A charity can
be blamed for its failures; a State service
cannot be disowned so easily. And once
a charity depends on annual grants, its
ability to criticise policy quietly evaporates.
No organisation challenges the funder
that determines whether it will exist the
following year.
This reliance also has deep cultural roots.
Ireland has long moralised social provision,
treating poverty and hardship as issues to
be addressed through private generosity
rather than structural guarantees. The
legacy of church-led services still shapes
expectations: the State funds piecemeal
support, while voluntary bodies fill the gaps
without ever questioning the existence of
the gaps themselves.
How the funding model
warps reality
Short-term grants, annual scrambling and
reliance on donations steadily reshape
a charity’s purpose. Long-term planning
becomes impossible. Success risks funding
cuts. Publicity becomes more important
than progress. Organisations begin to
highlight worsening crises because their
survival depends on doing so. Advocacy
softens because blunt criticism invites
retaliation. Over time, charities stop acting
as agents of change and become part
of a managed ecosystem of permanent
emergency.
This dynamic creates perverse
incentives. A homelessness charity
that ended homelessness would lose
relevance; a mental-health charity that
stabilised demand would see its budget
shrink. Governments, in turn, can point
to the presence of charities as evidence
of action, even when the underlying
problem deepens. The public sees constant
fundraising campaigns and concludes that
progress requires generosity, not policy.
The Charities Regulator ensures legal
compliance but cannot address mission-
drift, State influence or structural
dependence. Being compliant with the
law is a low bar; it tells us nothing about
whether an organisation is still serving the
purpose it was created for.
Case study: ISPCA–DSPCA
and the cost of compromise
Ireland’s modern animal-welfare system
rests on foundations laid two centuries
ago, when Martin’s Act of 1822 and the
London SPCA of 1824 framed cruelty as
something law and public pressure could
confront. Yet the reforming spirit that
animated those early movements faded as
the work shifted toward rescuing individual
animals. A volunteer-driven, donation-
dependent model took hold, shaped by
church traditions and goodwill rather than
enforcement. It oered compassion, but it
never had the structure to tackle systemic
cruelty.
In Ireland, this fragility was reinforced
by decades of political preference for
profitable farming, blood sports and rural
lobbying. Serious regulatory reform came
Success risks funding
cuts. Publicity becomes
more important than
progress
McVerry Trust: State bailout of €15million
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late and only under EU pressure in the
1990s. When the Department of Agriculture,
Food & the Marine (DAFM) began issuing
ex-gratia grants in 1995, it formally linked
welfare charities to the State, establishing
a relationship that mixed dependency
with quiet containment. The logic was not
subtle: it was easier to fund dissent than
face it.
The ISPCA, founded in 1949, built its
identity around a universal mission: to
protect all animals, whether domestic,
wild, captive or free, and to prevent cruel
practices wherever they occurred. The
DSPCA, operating in parallel, held similar
aspirations. But by the 2010s, both
organisations were struggling under surging
demand. Abandonment, overbreeding,
unregulated sales and a near-total absence
of mandatory insurance or enforcement
pushed their volunteer-heavy model to
breaking point. Before they ever received
policing powers, the charities were already
under-resourced and over-extended.
The 2013 Animal Health and Welfare
Act was sold as a turning point. It created
“authorised ocers” and granted ISPCA
and DSPCA inspectors long-sought
investigative authority. But the same
legislation quietly excluded them from
investigating farmed animals, horses,
greyhounds and any species used for
breeding or sport—the very areas where
industrial cruelty is most entrenched. More
than ninety per cent of animals, and almost
all institutional abuse, remained under the
supervision of DAFM, which also promotes
agricultural and sporting industries. The
conflict of interest was obvious, yet largely
unspoken.
From 2014, the charities entered formal
service agreements with the department.
These provided funding and powers but
sharply narrowed their remit. While publicly
presenting themselves as “the frontline
against cruelty for all animals”, the
contracts restricted them to a thin margin
of cases—about six per cent of captive and
domestic animals. Their founding purpose
to protect all species was eectively
incompatible with the State-designed
limits under which they now operated. The
agreements were also strikingly one-sided:
the Minister could alter or cancel them at
any moment, and the charities bore the
legal and financial risks. Independence,
already weakened by funding dependency,
was structurally curtailed.
The charities’ new policing role
introduced contradictions of its own. Their
constitutions required them to act through
“wholly charitable” means, yet they were
now collecting evidence for criminal
prosecutions. Inspectors were expected to
operate with the neutrality of public ocers
while still bound to a charitable ethos.
It was an impossible hybrid. Between
2014 and 2024, more than two hundred
convictions were secured, but their solidity
is not beyond question. The charities
regularly used images and testimony from
investigations in fundraising appeals,
even though the Act restricts evidential
material to legal proceedings. The High
Court’s warning in the Nikita Hand v Conor
McGregor case underscored the risks.
The collapse of a similar UK organisation,
Animal Protection Services, after concerns
about financial motives in prosecutions,
shows how quickly such hybrids can
unravel.
By 2024, the accumulated strain became
impossible to ignore. The ISPCA faced
governance problems, sta departures
and a Charities Regulator investigation.
Financial pressure mounted until
DAFM advanced €200,000 to stabilise
operations. The subsequent merger of
ISPCA and DSPCA was presented as a
strategic consolidation, but the timing and
circumstances leave open the question of
whether external prompting played a role.
What is clear is that decades of mission-
drift, legal contradictions and State
entanglement eroded both organisations’
ability to act as independent guardians of
animal welfare.
What real reform would
look like
If the nonprofit sector is to serve the
public rather than political convenience,
reforms must change the incentives. Multi-
year funding would allow planning and
measurement of progress. Advocacy must
be insulated from the fear of financial
reprisal. Inspection roles in sectors with
inherent conflicts — agriculture, housing,
disability — must be independent rather
than subcontracted to charities. The
regulator must be able to confront mission-
drift, not simply check paperwork.
International examples show this is
possible. Nordic countries, for instance,
significantly limit the role of charities
in essential services, relying instead on
stable, universal public provision. Where
charities exist, they complement the
system rather than substitute for it. Ireland
could move toward such a model, but doing
so requires political appetite for long-term
structural responsibility.
Time to end the quiet trade-off
The line between what government must
do and what charities do has been blurred
because it suits both sides. Charities gain
money and profile. The State sidesteps
responsibility.
Until the State stops using charities as a
shield—and charities stop accepting that
role—the underlying problems will remain
unaddressed. A sector built on annual crisis
will keep producing annual crises. Only
when responsibility is owned, rather than
delegated away, can compassion operate
honestly to confront poverty and cruelty.
We, and espcecially the most vulnerable,
need the sound of rued feathers.
The State sidesteps
responsibility; charities
gain money and profile.
Everyone benefits except
the people the system is
meant to serve
Legal contradictions and State entanglement eroded ability of ISPCA and DSPCA to
act as independent guardians of animal welfare
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