It is a well-established fact at this stage that a great many of the crusades and agendas close to the hearts of no small number of those in the Dáil, the media, academia and the civil society space couldn’t be further from the hearts and the minds of the Irish public.
Despite that, it’s never any less shocking to see that fact represented in cold, hard numbers. In black and white.
To be more specific, it’s always interesting to weigh the influence of, say, an NGO against the level of funding it receives directly from the public via donations and memberships. Of course, they often receive plenty of funding from the public, but indirectly, via Government grants or sustained agency/departmental funding.
An NGO that very much fits the above profile is the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), which could reasonably be described as having disproportionate access to the Department of Justice and the Irish Prison Service given the level of support its financials indicate it has from the public.
An “independent charity founded in 1994 by a group of citizens concerned about the abuses of human rights in Irish prisons”. Among its priority areas of work is the commitment to “a national penal policy which is just, humane, evidence-led, and uses prison as a last resort”.
As commented upon just yesterday by my colleague John McGuirk, what that view results in practically speaking at the moment is advocacy against building new prisons, the exploration of non-custodial alternatives, and limp-wristed reports that insist that criminal behaviour is the result of poverty rather than, well, criminality.
One of the IPRT’s other two priority areas of work is the positioning of itself “as a sustainable, well-resourced, respected and collaborative stakeholder in penal policy in Ireland”. Curious, that one of its limited priority areas of work is entirely devoted to its own influence on the Irish penal scene.
In any case, it’s had remarkable success on that front, as a look at its most recent annual report (2024) tells us. Total income for that year was a handsome €496,672, of which €383,999 was from ‘donations and legacies’ and €110,130 was from ‘other grants and funding’. A further €2,543 was listed under ‘other income’.
Let’s break down the most interesting of those categories, ‘donations and legacies’. A whopping €379,104 of that was ‘core funding’. While the report doesn’t identify all of the funding streams that are categorised under ‘core funding’, some of the major contributions there come from the Department of Justice, which provided €163,864 that financial year (part of a larger award of €491,952 covering the years 2023-2025); the Pobal ‘Scheme to Support National Organisations’, which gave €87,550 in the financial year (part of a larger award of €264,119 covering the years 2022-2025); and the Rowan Trust, which generously committed €110,000 that year (part of a larger award of €310,000 covering the years 2024-2027).
How much did the IPRT earn via memberships in 2024? €1,340. How much did it earn via ‘regular’ donations, so to speak? €3,555. So €4,895 of IPRT’s total income in 2024 came from memberships and donations. To put it differently, approximately one percent of IPRT’s total income of €496,672 in 2024 came from donations and memberships.
Other major donors that year included the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (also a taxpayer funded organisation); the Community Foundation for Ireland; Porticus UK; and the Katharine Howard Foundation, all of which contributed project and research funding worth a total of €137,820.
That, I would say, is the problem with modern, Irish governance in a nutshell. An extremely influential NGO whose voice is heard in government and echoes in the media is one percent funded by donations and memberships and 99 percent funded by grants, commitments and awards from the State, trusts and foundations.
To be fair, despite the slightly misleading ‘How we are funded’ section on its website that puts individual donations and membership subscriptions on a par with charitable trust funding in the first line of its answer, the IPRT isn’t shy about this state of affairs. The following paragraphs are a veritable who’s who of State bodies, philanthropies, foundations, trusts and more.
Up to the end of 2016, the IPRT had the “financial and other support” of two main philanthropic funders, The Atlantic Philanthropies and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
In the years after 2016, funding got underway from Pobal and the Department of Community and Rural Development; the then-Department of Justice and Equality; the Community Foundation for Ireland; the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission; the Irish Research Council (joint project with the Dublin Institute of Technology); the St Stephen’s Green Trust; the Ireland Funds; “a number of European projects”, etc., etc. You can see the rest of the awards on the aforementioned page linked here.
It honestly acknowledges that “these diverse new sources of funding helped ensure IPRT’s sustainability” in the years after 2016, the implicit implication being that if it had relied solely on public support, it likely wouldn’t be quite so influential as it is today.