Lolek Ltd, Trading as 'The Iona Institute'

(1) It's not Finance, it's the Revenue Commissioners. And, whatever else we can say about the Revenue Commissioners, they are actually pretty good at interpreting and applying the legislation as written, rather than distorting it through a policy of revenue maximisation.

(2) If the Iona Institute were liable to Corporation Tax, I seriously doubt that their liablity would be very big. I don't see them generating large profits, to be honest. So if the government authorities were to try to maximise revenue, chasing the charitable status of the Iona Institute through the courts would not necessarily be a good move, in cost/benefit terms.

There is currently no legal framework for the registration of charities in Ireland. The role of the Revenue Commissioners in relation to charities is confined to determining the eligibility of applications from bodies of persons or trusts for exemption under the provisions of Section 207 Taxes Consolidation Act 1997. The full list of bodies granted charitable tax exemption under the provisions of Section 207 TCA 1997 is published on the Revenue Commissioners website at the following link:
http://www.revenue.ie/en/business/charities.html
For reasons of taxpayer confidentiality, the Revenue Commissioners cannot comment upon the tax affairs of individual bodies.

Charitable tax exemption is not granted to religious groups regardless of the work they do.

Following on from oceanclub's example I also enquired as to the reasoning, again no justification, though the assertion that there isn't a blanket tax exemption for religious groups is somewhat heartening, is there any way to extract a justification for their charitable status?

Peregrinus wrote: »

You could check the parliamentary debates when the Charities Act was under discussion to see what justification the government advanced for this treatment, and what observations the opposition made. And it would be interesting to know what the independent senators had to say about it.

For those interested, I’ve done a quick and dirty scan of the Oireachtas debates on the Charities Act 2009 to see what was said about the notion that “advancement of religion” should be charitable in law.

For what it’s worth, nobody seems to have challenged the assertion head-on, and suggested that religion should simply be dropped from the list of charitable purposes.

But, from early on, there was a regularly-expressed concern that enterprises which were not, in reality, religious would assume a religious character in order to qualify for tax and other advantages as charities - or alternatively, that they would assume a religious character and not register as charities, while hoping that the public would assume they were charitable, and would support them accordingly.

Michael D. Higgins, then but a humble TD, described organizations for the advancement of religion as “a curious area”. He suggested that the legislation might need to distinguish between “genuine religions, ones established for tax purposes, and, most dangerous of all, cults”. And, less we miss the point, he added that “the Church of Scientology and others come to mind”. Higgins’s main concern, though, in the debates on the Bill was not the treatment of religion; he had a wider concern about establishing a human-rights based concept of charity. If anything, he wanted a broad concept of “charity” focused not just on poverty and economic issues but on broader issues of justice, and on social and cultural rights. I suspect, with that agenda, he would have been slow to start demanding wide exclusions from the notion of “charity”.

Jack Wall TD, of the Labour Party, put down an amendment to provide that “religion” was not to include “any organization or cult which . . . is primarily economic in nature or employs oppressive psychological manipulation of its adherents”. Amendments along these lines, though with slightly different wording, were discussed a couple of times as the Bill wound its way through the Dail and later the Seanad. Wall’s comments in support of the amendment suggested that he saw it as being directed at new movements that “are beginning to gain a foothold in Ireland”, rather than any of the long-established churches. He withdrew the amendment when the government promised further consideration of the question of whether religion should be automatically presumed to be “for the public benefit” (which it has to be, to have charitable status). Subsequently, an amendment to soften the presumption that the advancement of religion is always for the public benefit was passed.

In the Seanad, an amendment was moved by Dominic Hannigan (Labour) to provide that “humanism or any other philosophical life-stance” would get the same treatment as religion. David Norris supported the idea as regards humanism, but felt that the concept of “philosophical life-stance” was not well defined, and would “cover some groups I do not especially want to be covered”. Ivana Bacik also supported the amendment in so far as it would include humanism as charitable under the “advancement of religion” heading. The Labour party withdrew the amendment, though, because of the negative reaction to the vagueness of its language on “philosophical life-stances”. (Language about humanism never was inserted in the Bill, but as noted earlier in the thread the Humanist Association of Ireland does have recognition as a charity, presumably either because the authorities accept that humanism is a “religion” or because they accept that it is another “purpose that is of benefit to the community”.)

It was in the Seanad that the government brought forward its own amendment to organizations or cults whose principal object is making a profit, or who employ oppressive psychological manipulation of their own followers, or for the purposes of gaining new followers, and this amendment was passed. (It now appears as s. 3(1) of the Act.)