ENTREPRENEUR AND charity founder Niall Mellon has called for greater private sector involvement in Irish Aid, the overseas development wing of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
He has also warned against taxpayers' money being sunk into "anonymous UN funds" which do not have an efficient track record.
Before starting his house-building charity in South Africa in 2002, he had not realised how "protective" other Irish charities could be of "their space", he told an Oireachtas committee.
Calling for "much more" debate on the way Irish Aid funding is spent, Mr Mellon said the State agency had been "very slow to come to the table and accept the private sector".
Trying to get officials in the organisation to involve the private sector was like "getting a hockey player and asking him to come and play GAA or soccer".
He said senior officials at Irish Aid who met him recently had accepted that they envisaged private-sector involvement.
"But it is my view that is going to be a very slow crawl over the next 10 years unless there's a fundamental change, I think by way of legislation even, into the make-up of Irish Aid."
Mr Mellon made his comments during a presentation to the inaugural meeting of the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Overseas Development last week, which is chaired by John Deasy TD.
Mr Deasy said he was taking the comments "really seriously".
"I'm going to provide that forum within the subcommittee, whether it be the proper disclosure of audits of Irish Aid, the direction of Irish Aid, or total scrutiny of where the money is going," he told The Irish Times.
The Niall Mellon Township Trust was set up in 2002 to provide homes to impoverished communities in the townships of South Africa.
Irish volunteers have since built thousands of homes in the country, while the trust's work has been visited by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and received €5 million in Irish Aid funding earlier this year.
However, Mr Mellon said that, apart from "one cheque for a quarter of a million", this was the first time his organisation had received funding of this type, which had occurred "after we became successful".
He added that his charity was still not receiving multi-annual programme funding from Irish Aid.
"Positive questions need to be asked: are we supporting enough new emerging charities to get into this space?
"Private sector charities are still not treated as equal in the Irish Aid consideration process," he said.
"So I'd be saying to Irish Aid, 'right you've got €1.2 billion, we challenge you to raise another two or three billion with that money' . . . If that was a private-sector charity being given €1.2 billion, they'd have to raise three or four times that.
"For the next 10 years we're going to have €15 billion of Irish taxpayers' monies going abroad, and we need to debate the most efficient way that this money can be used.
"It would be a terrible legacy to the journey of getting to 0.7 per cent if we sink large amounts of money into anonymous United Nations funds that don't have an historical efficient track record."
He told members of the committee that the thing that had surprised him most about Irish charities "was probably the level of resistance to us, and little whispers about our charity when it started".
"That I hadn't realised how protective the existing charities would be of their own space."