As the Government raises the possibility of having to launch a multi-million Euro bailout of the McVerry Trust – which owes somewhere in the region of €8.3 million in unpaid PAYE, social insurance and VAT – the other NGOs are pumping up their demands for more taxpayer cash prior to next month’s Budget.
The Wheel which is a kind of advocacy group for the multibillion € NGO sector – and of which the McVerry Trust is one of its largest members – has rolled out the big guns and is crying poverty as it demands more moolah for the NGOs, and the big winners in that will be the super NGOs which employ thousands and whose budgets largely go to paying their own staff.
The McVerry Trust, for example, employed a total of 766 people in 2022, with a wage bill of more than €30 million, which represented the bulk of its overall income, most of which came from the taxpayer.
The Wheel itself would not exist had it not been for Atlantic Philanthropies which gave it more than $2 million, including an initial funding in 1999 to organise “a series of consultative conferences, with the goal of establishing a forum for the nonprofit sector in the Republic of Ireland.”
It was thus part of the Atlantic project to embed “social entrepreneurship” into the governance of the state – a status that was formalised by The Wheel becoming part of the Government’s Social Partnership arrangement alongside employers and trade unions in 2003.
Among their Budget demands are that people working in the NGO sector be placed on the same salary grades as public servants and that the NGO managers are included in public sector pay talks. Other proposals would significantly increase the level of funding to meet “core costs,” “good governance” and, of course, more money is sought for the NGOs under the rubric of “the civil need generated by the war in Ukraine.”
By my estimate, the cost of the proposals from The Wheel, including the pay demands, would run to several hundred additional million from the taxpayer, apart altogether from the normal funding for the NGOs which is sure to increase as a matter of course anyway.
To ensure that they get their point across there have been a whole raft of Dáil questions this week basically asking that the NGO demands be met, and one oral question that specifically quoted from The Wheel in relation to their ongoing claim that the NGOs are facing difficulties in retaining and paying staff. More of that anon.
First up was Sinn Féin’s Dublin West TD Paul Donnelly, a member of a party which back in the day deliberately pitched itself as a “community” alternative to state funded and institutionalised “clientelism.”
Donnelly quoted The Wheel’s figure on the pay disparity, and claimed that “this has led to those community, voluntary and charitable organisations being unable to recruit staff.”
The extent to which they are all of them singing from the same song sheet when it comes to the NGOs could hardly have been made clearer in the response of Minister of State Joe O’Brien. Having praised Donnelly’s “advocacy” on behalf of the advocates, the Minister said that he agreed that they “should be paid more.”
Similar promises of more money to come, and references to the large extra sums already granted since the last Budget, were made by O’Brien and the senior Minister in the Department of Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys, in response to a range of other similar queries. Including one from Paul Murphy who wanted to know how much extra cash would be bunged to the NGOs in order to “help them create inclusive communities and to combat the influence of far right individuals and groups in communities.”
While there may well be small NGOs which have been experiencing difficulties in retaining staff, that hardly appears to be the case with regard to the major NGOs, including those in the advocacy business.
The Wheel itself, according to its last published report, employed 29 people, an increase of 5 on the previous year. In 2016 it employed 15 people. So, it has basically doubled its workforce in seven years.
A random sampling of other NGOs we have mentioned of late shows similar expansion.
The McVerry Trust reported that it had 298 people employed in 2016. It had 766 last year. Over the same period, the Irish Refugee Council had more than trebled its full and part time workforce from 7 to 25.
One of the really big hitters, and a perfect example of how the NGOs have taken over public provision which they and their political supporters wish to expand, is Barnardo’s. It now employs a total of 471 people compared to 389 in 2016.
The Free Legal Advice Centres (FLAC) have grown from 16 to 25 employees over the same time frame.
So, whatever else might be going on, the NGO sector is certainly not undergoing a recession. As a clearly well-organised lobby with support from both opposition and, by implication, government ministers, there is little possibility that most of their demands will not be met.
The Atlantic Philanthropies project to radically transform the Irish state and civil society and to create a new cohesive class of taxpayer funded and unelected mandarins and activists has been successful beyond their wildest dreams.
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