The Minster for Housing Darragh O’Brien seems a little ambivalent about the idea of rescuing the Peter McVerry Trust. Speaking at the recent Fianna Fáil Ardfheis the Minister for Housing said any funding would have to come with strings attached. He said he was reviewing the request and will reveal the outcome of his deliberations “in the coming week or two”.
Such sniffiness about stepping up and rescuing an organisation that provides thousands of beds for homeless people every night seems a little misplaced. Especially when you consider that if this Government and its predecessors going back more than 40 years had taken responsibility for the issue there would be no reason for the McVerry Trust – set up in 1983 by Jesuit priest Peter McVerry – to exist in the first place.
O’Brien’s apparent reticence also jars with the enthusiasm usually shown by Ministers for any chance to bask in the reflected glory of the trust and its founder, even if he is not averse to giving them the occasional kick.
It’s worth noting that O’Brien is the same Minister who launched the McVerry Trust’s annual report this time last year whilst dodging questions about the likelihood of the Government meeting its housing targets. When he was taoiseach, Micheál Martin was happy to launch the trust’s 2021 to 2025 Strategic Plan alongside the current Minster for Finance, Michael McGrath.
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At that stage the McVerry Trust was at the apogee of its power. In the previous 10 years it had gone from having an annual budget of about €7.3 million to spending €53 million in 2021 on housing the homeless. To put that in perspective, the total spend by local authorities on homeless accommodation in 2023 is expected to be €350 million.
How one of the richest countries in the world arrived at such a sorry pass is of course the real story, and the spectacular rise and potential fall of the McVerry Trust is merely a subplot, but a telling one nonetheless.
In its 2021 annual report annual report the McVerry Trust lists the State organisations that funded its activities that year. The list runs to over 40 bodies and includes most of the county and city councils in the country. State funding in total accounted for €38 million out of the €53 million spent by the trust. The remainder was made up of revenue generated by the trust itself and capital funding.
The McVerry Trust – thanks to its charismatic and energetic founder – has always been well supported by the public. Its close association – via McVerry – with Belvedere College contributed to it being something akin to the pet charity of corporate Ireland. Those who have never been to an event that did not involve some sort of fundraising for the McVerry Trust must be few in number. But the trust’s support base is far wider – hence the appeal for politicians of photo-ops with McVerry.
There is a legitimate debate about whether the State is always the most effective actor when it comes to providing certain types of services. It is tinged by US-style philanthropy, which holds that super-rich donors know best how to put the world to rights.
But the huge amounts of money funnelled into the McVerry Trust by State agencies over the last decade amounts to little more than the outsourcing by the government of a problem they should have been dealing with themselves.
In any case, the wheels started to come off the McVerry Trust this year. In September, it was reported that it was struggling to pay a €8.3 million tax debt and was looking for emergency State funding.
We don’t know the full details of what went wrong but it is worth bearing in mind that very few organisations – never mind a small charity – could cope with the sort of growth the McVerry Trust experienced over the last 10 years as the State poured money into it, apparently unconcerned about governance and capacity issues as they desperately tried to deal with the ballooning numbers of homeless.
[ Scale of homelessness crisis is far worse than the official data suggestsOpens in new window ]
This fact, in particular, makes a mockery of O’Brien’s rather belated call for conditions to be attached to the emergency funding that the trust is now seeking. The time for conditions, oversight and all the other trappings that are supposed to go with State funding was 10 years ago when they decided to rely on a small charity to do their work for them.
The only decent thing for the Government to do now is take responsibility for the mess they helped create, and pay up.