Charity begins at home and only the homes of the needy should benefit

THERE’S no word for it but ‘scandalous.’ Secret payments to well-paid people, out of either public funds or charitable donations, are a scandal. It has to be highlighted, and it has to be ended.

Thousands and thousands of people in Ireland work in the public sector. Thousands more work in the voluntary and community sectors, their work supported by donations from the public and, to some extent, by the taxpayer. We’d all be much poorer without their work. They are committed to better outcomes for the people with whom they work.

In my work sector, I know people who do dangerous, emotionally draining, exacting jobs. If you are working with a homeless family, or an adult who has an intellectual disability, or a widow who has suffered a traumatic bereavement, you can’t get the results that person needs — the result they’re depending on you to help them with — unless you have empathy and skill.

You also have to have patience, doggedness, the willingness to make a mistake and start again, and time. For most people, the job doesn’t start at nine and end at five. You worry about ‘your people’ when you go home at night. You put in whatever hours they need.

That’s true, whether you’re a volunteer or it’s your job. There’s a view that everyone should be a volunteer — and we do without the support of thousands of committed, and often highly-skilled, volunteers.

But voluntary activity can’t transform the life of a child who has highly complex social and emotional needs. It takes professional qualifications to help a person who has severe disabilities to reach the outer limits of their potential. It takes years of experience to ensure that an elderly person, whose faculties are no longer what they were, lives with the dignity to which they are entitled.

For good or ill, this work falls to organisations that are routinely described as charities. I had the view, through much of my adult life, that this ought properly to be the work of the State.

Now, I see, at first-hand, the skills and temperament that are often required — the willingness to change constantly and to take risks frequently, the ability to put other people first, the need to learn and develop constantly, and the wide range of skills necessary.

It is work that often belongs in the community, rather than in the hands of a more distant state.

But even the word charity has different meanings for different people. Charity, they say, is a virtue — Saint Paul used the word charity to mean love. It is, fundamentally, about giving.

The people who give to charities are doing so out of a desire to help and to make the world better. The people who work for charities are motivated, in the main, by exactly the same thing.

When charities are performing complex tasks, or working in difficult situations, they have to operate with the highest degree of professionalism. If you have several hundred, highly committed employees, and hundreds more volunteers, you have to provide them with as much professional support and back-up as possible.

That means human resources, financial accounting, technological and communications supports, and the wide range of administrative and management operations that any responsible organisation needs. You have to fund that, and organise it so that the people on the front-line, whose job it is to change lives, have the back-up — and the terms and conditions — to which they’re entitled.

None of that happens without resources. All of it needs to be out in the open.

Most charitable organisations take their lead, when it comes to pay and conditions, from the public sector.

That’s not to say that all terms are identical. Far from it. The vast majority of organisations in our sector have endured cutbacks in recent years, and (as the saying goes) have learned to do more with less. Pay has been frozen or cut, increments have been suspended, people have struggled to maintain services at the front line.

For the vast, vast majority of committed, dedicated, and hard-working people in the sector, demand has gone up and resources have gone down during the recession. People on the front line have made many sacrifices to ensure that the rights they are fighting for — the rights of elderly, disabled, vulnerable, homeless, struggling people — are preserved.

Thousands and thousands of people who work in this sector have behaved not just responsibly, but nobly, to keep the show on the road.

So, it is deeply wounding to them when they discover how well some people are doing, at a time when everyone else is making do with less. And when that is compounded with secrecy, even though there may be no illegality, that deepens the wound. That’s why the practice of secret top-ups, when vulnerable people are being turned away, is a genuine scandal.

And, of course, it destroys trust. When you donate to a charity, you’re absolutely entitled to two things. You’re entitled to the assurance that your money is going to the altruistic purpose for which you intended it, and you’re entitled to know that it is being well-managed and properly accounted for. Secrecy robs you of both those assurances.

THAT’S why regulation is so important. We’ve had a Charities Act in place in Ireland since 2009. It provides for the establishment of an independent regulator. It has never commenced, because it would cost money. The Government will, apparently, commence the act next year, and will expect charities to make a contribution towards its cost.

We can do it now. We have all the skills necessary — they already exist in the public service. More to the point, there is a ready-made framework available for a charities regulator to begin enforcement immediately.

It’s called SORP — the statement of recommended practice — and it’s the system of best-practice accounting that applies to charities in the UK.

A number of charities in Ireland already use it, because of the absence of best-practice approaches here.

SORP provides a high degree of specificity in how money is spent. It obliges the organisation, for instance, to report on higher salaries, and it enables donors to see, with much greater clarity, how their money is being spent.

Charities using SORP must publish their annual accounts. (If you can’t find a properly audited set of accounts on a charity’s website, you can be pretty sure they’re not adhering to best standards).

Look, if recent revelations tell us anything, they tell us that regulation is vital. If charities are to do the work that’s needed, we must be trusted. Everything needs to be out in the open. There’s no room for any more delay or equivocation. We need regulation and we need it now.