When I was a child, the Trócaire box was, unfailingly, perhaps the central part of lent. The rule used to be that the money you would usually spend on sweets, and so on, would go into the little cardboard box instead, adorned with the pictures of the unfortunate and the starving. You were still buying the sweets, the reasoning went, but you were buying them for somebody else, instead. Somebody in need.
In the public imagination – and certainly, in the imagination of those children and adults who still turn over faithfully, every year, their pennies and euros to the Trócaire box, that is what Trócaire does. It feeds the hungry, and clothes the poor. Unfortunately, the imagination of the public, these days, is just that. Trócaire is less a charity, in 2022, than it is just another lobby group. Don’t take my word for it either – here’s the Charities Regulator, per The Times:
The charities regulator has written to Trócaire, the overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in Ireland, to “remind” it that any future political activity must “directly advance and support [its] stated charitable purposes”.
The letter was prompted by two formal complaints to the regulator about recent campaigns by Trócaire — which was set up to combat poverty and injustice in the developing world — relating to the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.
In one complaint, a man said he had received an unsolicited mailshot from the charity featuring a Palestinian flag on a postcard with a request to “display the flag overleaf inside your home to show solidarity with the children, women and men of Gaza and Palestine”.
The actual issue at hand doesn’t matter so much. In this case, it’s predictable left wing campaigning on the Israel/Palestine issue, which does absolutely nothing for the people of Palestine. But it might well be Trócaire’s endless campaigning on climate change, or its lobbying for a “Business and Human Rights” Treaty, or its behind the scenes lobbying for “net zero” emissions by 2030. Go and have a look at what Trócaire does, these days, and you won’t find a catholic charity, but a cookie cutter left wing lobby group.
All of which poses a simple question: Why?
After all, it’s not as if Ireland is short of lobby groups campaigning for Net Zero, to cite just one example. Is An Taisce not enough? Are Friends of the Earth incompetent? Does the Green Party exist for no reason?
And what of the Israel/Palestine issue? We already have Sinn Fein for that. And the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. And about 40 cast members of Fair City, all campaigning on that issue.
Trócaire, by contrast, is not supposed to be a campaigning body. That’s the reason people give money to it in the first place – in a world full of talkers and lobbyists and political activists, the whole idea is that you give your money, and it goes to people in need. Except increasingly, that’s not the case.
Take a look at Trócaire’s homepage, in the photo above, and you don’t see a Catholic Charity, or really, a charity at all. You might as well be looking at the website of any one of a hundred other dreary, miserable left wing campaign groups. The money, as is the case for much of the NGO sector, comes only partly from donors these days. Go to their “funders” page and you’ll find the Irish Government, doling over the cash. And the European Union.
One of the things about a charity, in theory, is that it is supposed to be independent. Trocaire is anything but. It is now just another one of the long litany of Irish NGO organisations suckling at the taxpayer’s teat, and spinning the same predictable, tiresome yarns on every issue of public policy that almost every other taxpayer funded organisation does. And it seems less focused these days on exporting food and clothes than it does to exporting ideology. Look at its partners page – the list of the people to whom it doles out cash – and you’ll find a range of organisations in the third world campaigning for “human rights”, which tends, of course, to mean paying lawyers, rather than feeding the hungry.
Is there not space, any more, for an organisation that simply does what Trócaire is supposed to do? That feeds the hungry, and clothes the poor? That’s what people imagine it does, I think, when they put the tenner in the box at the back of the church. But it’s not what Trócaire actually does, primarily. At this stage, it’s little more than a front organisation for the NGO establishment to allow them to extract cash from Catholics.