An analysis of the last decade of the accounts of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, from 2013-2022, shows that the organisation has become nearly entirely reliant on government money, with over 96% of the organisation’s staffing costs over the last 3 years being paid for with grants from government departments and publicly funded entities such as the HSE.
During the same period those staffing costs increased from €443,000 to €805,000, an increase which has been nearly entirely funded by public money.
Grant reports covering the period between 2017 and 2022 show us that public money has directly paid an average of roughly 90% of the staffing costs of the NWCI. Staffing costs would cover staff wages, pension contributions, possibly bonuses, etc. And that average is getting higher; If we take only the last three years we have data for, 2022-2020, we see that an average of 96% of the NWCI’s staffing costs have been paid for directly by grants from government departments and the HSE.
Between 2020 and 2022 the NWCI paid €2.24 million to cover staff costs – €2.15 million of that bill was paid for with public money. In 2020 98.7% of the NWCI’s staffing costs were paid for with public money – against staff costs of €704,191 the NWCI received €695,085 in grants.
In the last ten years the NWCI has had an income of roughly €9.2 million, of which roughly €7.4 million came from either governmental or publicly funded entities. The single largest donor over that time was the Department of Justice who, over the last decade, have given the NWCI €3.47 million. Most of that was prior to 2021, after which DoJ funding largely stopped and the Department of Equality stepped in to pick up the slack – between 2021/22 the DoE has given the NWCI €1.175 million.
Both the DoJ and DoE grants were specifically granted to cover NWCI staffing and administrative costs to allow the NWCI to “provide a women’s equality analysis on all policy areas, consult with women and women’s organisations and to leverage additional private funds to promote women’s equality.” In 2022 the total value of the DoE grant for this purpose was €611,000, of which €521,991 went to staff costs of the NWCI.
Between 2013 and 2022 membership subscriptions and donations made up roughly 4.1% of the NWCI’s income. That figure does not include grants from the J Rowntree Trust and Atlantic Philanthropies as donations – the NWCI’s accounts initially class income from those sources as grants but, after 2015, begin to reclassify those grants as donations, including figures that had been classified as grants in the previous years accounts.
Non-governmental funding used to be a significant part of the NWCI’s funding, but that changed in 2015 when the NWCI stopped receiving money from Atlantic Philanthropies – in 2014 the NWCI pulled in €365,623 in non-governmental or private funding, in 2015 they took €80,148, and by 2017 it had fallen to its lowest point at €31,157. That figure has gone up, in 2022 it was €137,876, but not as quickly as public funding. Over that period the share of NWCI income that came from public monies increased from 51%, in 2013, to a height of over 90%, in 2018, before falling to 83% in 2022.
2015 was the last year the NWCI received less than 80% of its funding from public monies.
Private funding
Between 2020 and 2022 the NWCI brought in €3.24 million in income, of which €524,145 was not public money. The two single largest contributors to that amount were Miscellaneous Income, at €136,545, and Member Subscriptions, at €112,580.
Over the same period the NWCI received grants of €85,205 from the Centre for Reproductive Rights; €75,341 from Novo Tides; and €51,694 from the Community Foundation Ireland. Of those three organisations two are American and one is Irish.
Community Foundation Ireland is an Irish organisation which “aims to help people to engage in more effective and rewarding philanthropic activity by connecting donors to the most deserving and impactful causes.” Ireland, they say, “is a work in progress.”
The Centre for Reproductive Rights is an American NGO which “uses the power of law to advance reproductive rights as fundamental human rights around the world.” In June of 2023 it had assets of $112,428,124.
Novo Tides is a bit more unclear; the NWCI’s accounts do not give any details of the grant, or the granter, and basic online searches showed no relevant organisation of that name. However, October 2020 saw the Tides Foundation, a donor advised fund based in San Francisco, launch a partnership with the NoVo Foundation, an American private foundation controlled by Peter Buffett, son of investor Warren Buffet, to “build girls’ power and create communities supported by organizations and individuals that put girls’ needs, dreams and futures at the center.”
Whilst we can’t be certain it would appear, given that 2021 was the first year the NWCI notes this grant in their accounts, the Novo Tides name in the NWCI accounts, and the shared interests of the Tides Foundation, NoVo, and the NWCI, fairly likely that this is the source of the grant.
It is worth noting that the Washington Examiner has called the Tides Foundation a “leader in secret political money” through the provision of “dark money.” The foundation, according to the Washington Examiner, “pioneered the concept of providing a cut-out for donors who don’t wish to be associated in public with a particular cause.”
This refers to the foundation’s practice of allowing donors to make a donation to the foundation with the understanding that the foundation will then use that donation to issue a grant to a different organisation. This allows donors to put space between themselves and the third party they wish to fund, which can have the effect of obfuscating the initial source of the money as any public disclosure will show that the money came from the Tides Foundation rather than the individual donor.
How much of a membership organisation is the NWCI?
Whilst the NWCI certainly has organisations which are members of it a more interesting question has been the extent to which the NWCI is directly supported by the women of Ireland. One would expect, given the NWCI’s position that it is the representative body for women in Ireland, that there would be considerable support for its work from Irish women.
Looking at the amount of individual membership subs on the NWCI accounts gives us a way of working out roughly how many paying, individual members the NWCI has. They charge a minimum of €60 a year, paid either in full or in monthly instalments of €5, to become a ‘Feminist Changemaker,’ but do suggest an annual payment of €120 as a “I’m Feeling Generous” option.
The 2022 accounts list “Feminist Changemakers/Individual membership sub” as coming to €13,441. That is to say that, if all members pay €60 the NWCI has 224 individual members, and if they all pay €120 the NWCI has 112 individual members. Given that the NWCI’s website states that 190 organisations are members of the NWCI it is entirely possible that more NGOs are members of the NWCI than actual people.
This analysis is somewhat complicated by two facts.
Firstly, the NWCI have incorrectly set up their donation system and you can donate less than the minimum required if you set their donation page to make an annual donation.
Their system allows you to give a custom donation, presumably with the idea that there are people out there willing to give the NWCI more than €120 a year. They, wisely, set this so that you could not enter less than the minimum monthly payment, €5, but forgot they had to set the limit higher on the annual donation page to avoid people giving them anything between €5 and €60.
Not wishing to take undue advantage of sloppy work I, generously, gave the NWCI €10 for the privilege of holding the title of feminist changemaker, at least until the end of the year.
Secondly, whilst becoming a Feminist Changemaker is listed in the NWCI’s accounts as a “Feminist Changemakers/Individual membership sub,” and parts of the NWCI website sell it as becoming a member, the NWCI amended its constitution in 2021 to remove individual memberships. More correctly they amended their constitution to explicitly state that the only members of the NWCI were organisations, not individuals. The term ‘member’ is now defined in the constitution as “an organisation who becomes a member of the Company pursuant to these regulations” and the constitution specifies that “The Company shall have one category of Member.” That replaced the old definition which stated the term member could refer to “an organisation or individual.” It’s unclear why the NWCI felt it necessary to make this change.
Given that, and given that other parts of the NWCI website studiously avoid calling the programme a membership, it would appear entirely possible that the NWCI technically has zero individual members, and that the programme it is selling is not a membership at all.
I did ask the NWCI, prior to the publication of this piece, to clarify the basis on which they call those who join the Feminist Changemaker programme members given the constitutional change put through in 2021 – they did not respond.
Regardless of those uncertainties one thing that is absolutely clear is that the NWCI could not sustain itself purely through membership subscriptions and individual donations. In fact, there’s not a single year in the past decade in which annual subscriptions and donations would have, combined, been enough to cover the lower end of the current salary scale provided for NWCI Director Orla O’Connor (€82,000 – €97,375).
Nor could it sustain itself on the money it receives from private donors. The NWCI is, bluntly, entirely reliant on the largess of the state to continue to exist. Were all state funding of the NWCI to stop tomorrow the cash reserves of the organisation would be simply unable to support the organisation for more than a few months.
The Referendum Campaign and the NWCI
An obvious question that arises from our analysis of the NWCI’s finances is the extent to which an entity which relies so totally on the state to exist can be considered to be independent, and to what extent such an entities’ activity, given that a near totality of their staffing costs are paid for directly by the state, can be considered to be independent.
This is a particularly interesting question given the judgement that came from the 1995 McKenna v. An Taoiseach court case. That case saw the MEP Patricia McKenna bring an appeal to the Supreme Court, having had her claim dismissed at the High Court level, arguing that the Government’s use of public money to promote a ‘Yes’ vote in the then upcoming divorce referendum was unconstitutional and infringed upon “the concept of equality which is fundamental to the democratic nature of the State.”
The Supreme Court produced a judgement which stated that, whilst it was permissible for the State to spend public money to provide the public with unbiased information about referendums, the use of taxpayer money to promote a particular outcome during a referendum was “an interference with the democratic process” and an infringement on concepts which were “fundamental to the democratic nature of the State.”
I’m not qualified to discuss the legal state of the McKenna judgement or to argue if the NWCI getting involved in a referendum campaign when 96% of their staffing costs are paid for directly by the state could legally be considered to constitute the state funding of a particular referendum outcome, but many of the points brought up in the McKenna judgement can be considered as civil, rather than legal, arguments.
To wit, it is a legitimate opinion to say that it is improper for state money to be used to attempt to influence the public to vote a particular way in a referendum as to allow it would be to undermine the democratic nature of the process.
On that basis, one can seriously question if the NWCI referendum campaign, particularly coming as it did in the wake of Minister Roderick O’Gorman’s comment to the Irish Times that “any organisation that sees itself as progressive and as wanting to advance progressive change” would have to explain why they did not support the referendum, should be considered to be an improper intrusion of state money into a referendum process.
Minister O’Gorman’s Department, between 2021 and 2022, paid over €1 million euro to cover the staff costs of the NWCI. And, again, between 2013 and 2022 membership subscriptions and donations made up only 4.1% of the NWCI’s income.
It appears to be a simple fact that the NWCI could not campaign in favour of the passing of these referendums without state support, because without state support it doesn’t appear that the NWCI would exist. And the NWCI isn’t just campaigning for the referendums, they seem to be leading the campaign. The “YesYes” website, which lists over a dozen Irish organisations which support the passing of the upcoming referendums, lists its contact email as yesyes@nwci.ie and its contact location as “National Women’s Council of Ireland.”
The NWCI were asked, prior to publication of this piece, how they were ensuring that public money was not being used for the NWCI’s referendum campaign given that it appears that nearly all employees of the NWCI are paid for directly by public money – they did not respond.
The NWCI were also sent several of the figures we had pulled together from their accounts, from the percentage of their income that came from memberships and donations to the percentage of their staff costs which the government directly covers, prior to publication in order to let them comment on the figures or dispute their accuracy – they did not respond.