Fr Peter McVerry has described his decision to step down as secretary to the board of the eponymous housing charity he founded 42 years ago as “a non-story if there ever was a non-story”.
“I have been secretary of the trust since it was founded, which goes back a long, long time and the regulators have asked that we simply rotate the role,” the 81-year-old Jesuit told Newstalk this week. He put on a brave face, but it is not quite that simple.
McVerry remains a director of the charity which required €15 million in emergency support from the government two years ago. The chair of the organisation, solicitor Deirdre-Ann Barr, stepped down last week and three other directors have indicated they will not seek reappointment when their terms expire later this year.
It is unclear who requested that McVerry “rotate” as secretary. The charity has been the subject of critical reports from the Approved Housing Bodies Regulatory Authority, the Charities Regulator and the Comptroller and Auditor General. All of which have raised issues around governance. “Numerous key compliance and governance failures” were found by the Charities Regulator.
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The role of company secretary – which McVerry held for so many years because, in his own words, he was “always available” – is now seen as integral to corporate governance. Forty years ago, the job was more about booking rooms, organising meetings and taking the minutes.
According to the Institute of Public Administration, the role of company secretary now includes the “the development, management and review of governance policies and procedures; and act[ing] as a sounding board and adviser to the chairperson, board and senior management team on governance matters”.
It is highly doubtful that the governance failures at the McVerry Trust could be attributed to its founder’s role as company secretary, and it does feel a little as though McVerry is now being scapegoated as part of some corporate governance box-ticking exercise. If that is the case, it will serve little purpose and is a poor reward for 40 years of toil. He deserves better.
A more useful exercise might be to establish why the national response to a cascading homelessness problem was spearheaded by a voluntary organisation. The simple explanation is because it worked – until it did not.
The first decades of the Peter McVerry Trust were a textbook example of how a driven individual can harness scarce resources to solve a social problem that the State was failing to address. What started in 1979 as a hostel for homeless boys ballooned into an organisation that by 2022 owned freehold property valued at €162.3 million and was receiving on average €32 million a year in State funding and raising another €14 million in private donations.
Thanks in no small part to McVerry – and his connections to Jesuit schools such as Belvedere College – the trust became the darling of the corporate sponsorship world. The notion of a nimble, focused private sector body fixing a problem that the stumbling State bureaucracy couldn’t was very Celtic Tiger. It was the political equivalent of catnip. Few politicians would pass up the chance for a photo opportunity with McVerry.
The trust became the backbone of the State’s response to the growing problem of homelessness in Dublin and elsewhere.
The extent to which the State had become dependent on the McVerry Trust was spelt out in an email from Mary Hayes, director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE), to an official in the Department of Housing who sought her views on whether the State should prop up the trust two years ago. Hayes told the department that DRHE funded the trust to provide more than 800 beds for homeless people, as well as supporting more than 500 people who had been moved from homelessness into Housing First tenancies.
“I do not think I can stress enough however, how dependent we are on the service at this time and how crucial its immediate survival is to us as a partner in the provision of services to people experiencing homelessness, particularly rough sleepers and chronically homeless,” she said.
How the State got itself into a position where it was so dependent on a voluntary organisation to provide a vital service is perhaps the real issue here. In truth, it has probably got off lightly if the bill for this decades-long abrogation of its responsibilities turns out to be only €15 million.
Of wider concern is the extent to which this “model” of funnelling money into voluntary bodies to provide services that the State can’t or won’t provide directly is widespread.
The HSE relies extensively on what are termed section 39 organisations to provide services to people with physical and intellectual disabilities and also the elderly. Many are run by religious orders. The larger ones receive millions each year from the State and raise substantial funds from the public.
There are many lessons from the McVerry trust debacle, both for the individuals who run these bodies and for Government.
