Former CEO of Peter McVerry Trust spent €350k on driveway and peacock enclosure, PAC told

The Public Accounts Committee heard on Thursday that the installations were made at Kerdiffstown House, near Naas, when the scandal-hit trust was being run by then-CEO Pat Doyle (pictured), who used the homeless accommodation as his head office during the covid pandemic. File photo: Leah Farrell/RollingNews.ie

The head of homeless charity the Peter McVerry Trust (PMVT) spent €350,000 on a driveway at a shelter in Co Kildare, along with the construction of a new lift shaft and a peacock enclosure, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

The Public Accounts Committee heard on Thursday that the installations were made at Kerdiffstown House, near Naas, when the scandal-hit trust was being run by then-CEO Pat Doyle, who used the homeless accommodation as his head office during the covid pandemic.

Francis Doherty, who succeeded Mr Doyle briefly as CEO in 2023 before resigning four months later as the scale of the charity’s financial troubles came to light, told the committee that the annual budget for Kerdiffstown itself was €1m, together with a further €125,000 for service level agreements.

He said those details had only come to light when he became CEO himself in June 2023 and gained access to invoices.

The PMVT, one of the most prominent homeless service providers in the country, eventually required a €15m bailout from the State after its cashflows collapsed completely in the wake of years of underbidding for inappropriate housing contracts.

Mr Doherty said when he first took over as CEO he had been informed by the board that the bona fides of the charity “could not be... in better financial health”, only to subsequently discover that statement “could not have been further from the truth”.

He said that in June 2023 he discovered the trust owed €18m to various creditors and had just €437,000 on hand across its various bank accounts.

He added that he noticed that two bank accounts belonging to the trust used for social housing had been almost emptied of roughly €1.5m in cash in December 2022, with that money going to two companies — Rubicon and New Directions.

He said that New Directions, a private company delivering counselling services which received €350,000, was where Mr Doyle had planned to work once his tenure at the trust came to an end, with Mr Doherty alleging that the former CEO had told him that the money had been transferred in order to ensure that Mr Doyle’s own future salary could be paid.

That money was later refunded to the trust, the committee heard.

Meanwhile, Mr Doherty revealed that Rubicon was the main maintenance contractor for the charity, with the firm’s principal officer being the brother of PMVT’s auditor Donal Ryan. Mr Doherty outlined a conflict of interest involving the company, in which Rubicon sold properties not in compliance with building regulations to the trust for €975,000 in 2019, and which saw the company paid €300,000 to renovate them in turn.

The committee heard Mr Doyle had been retained on his CEO salary for two months until the end of July 2023 so that he would be in a position to answer questions regarding the charity’s administration, despite Mr Doherty having taken over as CEO by that point.

Mr Doherty said that in the last 90 minutes of Mr Doyle’s tenure he had applied for a loan of between €4m and €5m from one of the pillar banks to bolster the organisation’s cashflows, though that loan was never delivered.

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The committee heard that Mr Doyle — who was CEO at the charity for 18 years before stepping down in May 2023 — has declined to discuss the goings-on at the trust ever since at the request of the organisation’s board.

Mr Doherty said he had had no reason to disbelieve the board when it informed him that the charity was in good financial health when he took over as CEO given the depth of experience of the board’s personnel.

He said he had been ignorant of the cashflow issues in place given that several layers of management lay between him and the CEO’s office during his previous 10-year stint with Peter McVerry.