Ex-CEO of Peter McVerry Trust to tell PAC of 'financial chaos' he inherited when he took role

Francis Doherty (pictured), who worked with the charity for 10 years before succeeding Pat Doyle as CEO, is set to tell the PAC on Thursday that on the day he took over the job, it owed close to €18m to various creditors and had just €437,000 cash on hand across its various bank accounts. File picture: Brendan Gleeson

The former chief executive of the beleaguered Peter McVerry Trust housing charity was advised when taking his role that “the organisation could not be handed over to you in better financial health”.

However, Francis Doherty is set to tell the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that the description he received regarding the trust’s finances “could not have been further from the truth”.

Mr Doherty, who worked with the charity for 10 years before succeeding Pat Doyle as CEO, is set to tell the PAC on Thursday that on the day he took over the job, it owed close to €18m to various creditors and had just €437,000 cash on hand across its various bank accounts.

“The organisation had zero cash reserves, it had €125 in a sinking fund, all restricted fundraising and grant income for specific purpose use had been spent when there should have been more than €5m in restricted bank accounts on the back of purpose-specific donations,” he will tell the committee.

He is expected to explain that the trust, founded in 1983 by Newry-born priest Peter McVerry, had ended up in its parlous financial state after “a decade of securing new homeless services by bidding substantially less than the actual costs to run the services”.

The situation left “pretty much every service” that the charity provided running a “substantial deficit”, apart from its Tusla and international protection work, he claims.

He will say that the “scale of the financial chaos I inherited” is illustrated by the fact that despite the involvement of the Department of Housing, the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, PWC, Crowe Ireland, a new board, new external auditors, and additional finance staff, more than two years later “the finances are still not fully understood or resolved”.

Mr Doherty was CEO of the trust for just over four months from June 2023, resigning that October and declaring that repeated governance failings had brought the charity to the brink of collapse.

His session before PAC will be the first in a day-long series of hearings to discuss the plight of the trust, taking in representatives from the Department of Housing and the Charities Regulator among others as well as the trust’s current chair, former HSE chief executive Tony O’Brien.

Mr Doherty is set to take aim at a number of those bodies in his statement, asking why the Charities Regulator, for example, did not act on several occasions once the trust’s situation came to light to “appoint independent trustees... to help to protect the services, service-users and staff”.

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His strongest criticism will be reserved for the charity’s then board, however, claiming that it “prioritised self-interest over the best interests” of the trust, thus putting “staff and service-users at risk”.

He will say that despite smaller businesses showing up at the offices of the trust seeking dues in the wake of its financial meltdown, the then chair of the board Deirdre-Ann Barr had told him to prioritise payments for “two companies recently engaged to provide legal and PR advice”.

“The extraordinary efforts that I, and my team, made to keep the trust operational across the summer of 2023 were paralleled by a board which seemed to transition from ignorance to self-preservation,” he will say.