Irish Examiner view: Why pass our obligations to charities?

One assessment predicts that Irish charities face a fall in income of around €440m. Picture: Andy Gibson

The German comedian Henning Wehn has a sketch about charities: "We don't do charity in Germany. We pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments' responsibilities." Like all good comedy, German comedy too, it has more than a kernel of truth in it. 

However, any response to that argument, be it a belly laugh or a half shameful examination of the floorboards, will depend on your politics. In this instance, we are indeed far closer to Boston than Berlin so Wehn could expect a bemused rather than an amused reaction from an Irish audience.

We have developed what seems an inordinate dependence on charities to deliver services that other cultures regard as obligations of society to be discharged through the government and are proudly delivered through official channels. The 2019 Charities Regulator Annual Report recorded that there were 10,514 charities registered at the end of last year. 

This figure - 10,514 - seems large in a country with a population under 5m and underlines how very central charities have become in our social structures. That stands even if many of them are effectively contractors delivering social services on behalf of just one client - our government.  

The objectives of those charities were to benefit communities (54%), various supports for education (30%), challenging poverty or economic disadvantage (9%) and religion (7%). All of those, except the last one, take on tasks that, in an ideal world, should that nirvana ever materialise, are properly the responsibility of one government office or another. That 875 charities reported an income greater than €1m last year confirms that.

That landscape has been changed utterly, as have many others, by the pandemic. One assessment predicts that Irish charities face a fall in income of around €440m. 

Covid-19 brought a sudden end to on-the-ground and face-to-face collections. Some charities say that this income collapse means that their ability to provide services will be challenged as never before.

Ironically, it took the pandemic to put a new emphasis on how reliant the State has deliberately become on the sector to meet urgent need around everything from housing to cancer support; meals for vulnerable children to mental health services; addiction treatment facilities and counselling. A slick, or maybe a disingenuous one, marketing department might describe this as burden-sharing driven by a social conscience. 

A more sceptical view might suggest that it shows how comfortable our governments are at passing the buck. 

That view might also argue that this contracting-out pushes the idea of public accountability further from the central position it should occupy in our public affairs.

Helen Martin, the Charities Regulator CEO expressed that conundrum differently: “The current public health crisis has put an enormous amount of pressure on many registered charities that are increasingly called upon to provide services while facing unprecedented difficulties with regard to their traditional methods of fundraising.” If those services are vital, and most are, why is the government not providing them?

The pandemic has raised many, many questions around the engineering of our society and how we support each other - and how that support is funded. Maybe it's time to review how we use charities to do what is ideally a function of government especially as Henning Wehn would argue that the joke has been on us for far too long.