Rival charities set up new super charity scam

Spanish Eyes wrote: »

I note that the six charities coming together are involved with international aidto developing poorer countries.

Can they not tap into the €750 odd million pa the taxpayer provides for International aid? Just wondered.

They may well do, if the programmes they want to run are compatible with the Department's policy on the programmes it wants to fund. What's your point?

Peregrinus wrote: »

Staff costs includes more than just pay, counsellors may have to be paid for all their time devoted to the job and not just for the counselling hours, and there will be employees other than the counsellors.

My point is that a charity whose mission is mainly providing services will always spend a significant part of its budget on staff. This isn't evidence that the charity is inefficient. I think sunshinenew is wrong to say that most charities will keep staff costs below 15%, but I also don't think we should expect that they will. For many charities, staff costs ought to be substantially higher than that.

PS: Where are you getting the €25/hr figure from? I'm not doubting you; I'm just curious.

perhaps that 15% is the cost of running the charity i.e. their admin costs?

A large section of their funding comes from Government. Politicians are setting themselves up for their job if they ever lose their seats.

When you look into a lot of them, they are hangovers of when Labour were in power with FG.

I keep on highlighting Spunout.ie. Founded by Ruiri McKiernan who was on President Higgins (Labour) Council of State. One of the directors was Chris Donoghue (formerly Newstalk, now FG).

This is their income



This is their spending


They raise about 110k themselves and the other 500k+ comes from Government.

What do we get for it?

About 20% goes on "Operations" and Youth Activity. The rest goes on wages and running the company. They get **** all Social Media Interactions.
https://twitter.com/SpunOut?s=09
It's most the same person liking a retweeting the posts. (he works there BTW)

I would imagine if we turned up at Spunout.ie HQ over at Fleet Street on a normal day, they wouldn't be there or will be sitting around playing solitaire.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Sunshinenews' claim was that . . .

And OSI refuted this by posting details of several charities whose staff costs alone were well over 15% (though admin costs alone were well below 15%).

I don't think it can (or should) be correct for a charity that's primarily engaged in direct service provision (which is a lot of them) that staff costs, with or without other costs, should be below 15%. On the contrary, in fact; if staff costs were that low it should ring alarm bells.

we need to differentiate between the staff costs for providing the charities services and staff costs for running the charity.

Eric Cartman wrote: »

they share a building with amnesty international and a few other charities, the staff work between them, its just Colm o Gormans pockets being lined.

Ah, I didn't know that. Amnestys method of saying "we don't take government funding", except through the backdoor.

Peregrinus wrote: »

I'm not sure that's a bright-line distinction. Imagine a charity that employs social workers to assess and counsel clients, managers to manage the social workers, trainers to maintain the social workers' professional skills, childcare workers to care for clients' children while they are being counselled by the social workers and other staff whose role is to liaise with the funders - a government department, say - to agree what services the charity will provide, to what client group, and at what cost,and to satisfy the funder that the charity is delivering as agreed. Which of these staff costs are "costs for providing the charities services" and which are "costs for running the charity"?

all excellent questions that i will not attempt to answer.

The issue is less the ceo salaries and more the duplication and bloat.

A CEO on 100k running a foreign aid charity - no issue.

20 CEOs on 100k running 20 foreign aid charities - that's an issue.

Deleted User wrote: »

Here’s one to get you started. https://www.focusireland.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Signed-Focus-Ireland-consolidated-Financial-statements-31-Dec-2016.pdf

Just google financial statements of any charity. They make depressing reading!

You probably picked the wrong one to highlight. Focus Ireland is one of the better ones.

Directors and trustees get ZERO payment. Chief Exec gets €115k which is not outrageous considering a similar position in a similar sized private company would be well in excess of €150k and pension contribution are 7% - again much lower than private companies.


But there is far too much overlap on charities especially in the homeless sector. So a culling on the number of charities is probably something that should be looked at.

€7.7bn of the irish charity industry's €14.5bn annual income comes from the government so if you pay tax you can be happy in the knowledge that you are already contributing.

"Homelessness charity finds that there is lots of homelessness"

"Racism charity finds that there is lots of racism"

Etc, etc

Remember, 189,000 people are employed in this industry.

Calahonda52 wrote: »

Any thoughts on this piece, which is equally, if not more relevant than the funding/costs model:

The coronavirus appeal will focus on vulnerable communities in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, all coping with the impact of widescale conflict, as well as Ethiopia, Kenya, Lebanon and the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

Ethiopia has an Air Force with 24 combat aircraft.

Our Aer Corps has no combat aircraft, AFAIK.

Their Army has battle tanks, AFAIK we have none.


And we are expected to pay them charity?!!

^^^^ but surely the very fact these charities are coming together to achieve these efficiencies proves the point being made?