Funding cut for non-profit watchdog Benefacts slammed
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The Government’s “extraordinary” decision to slash funding for the country’s biggest database on non-profits needs probing, the Social Democrats have said.
Joint-leader of the party, Catherine Murphy TD, called for the Public Accounts Committee to examine the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) decision to cut funding for Benefacts, which the State spent €6.5m helping set up and run.
As a result, the website — which provides a publicly available centralised database of detailed information on 20,695 non-profits as well as the State’s €7.4bn in grants to 2,457 non-profits — will close on February 14.
Ms Murphy wants the Public Accounts Committee to look into the decision to cut Benefacts funding and she wants the decision reversed, even if temporarily.
She also wants to know why the decision was taken despite the State not having a comparable database in place to take over.
“It just seems extraordinary that this has been allowed to happen and I think it merits a look at - to try and find out why this is happening,” she told the
DPER, which has provided grant funding to Benefacts since 2015, undertook a review of the work it does in 2020.
DPER Minister Michael McGrath TD said, in a written answer to TD Bernard Durkin why Benefacts funding was cut, that ”the business case for its continued funding of Benefacts was no longer justified”.
Despite there not being, according to the minister, a business case to keep funding Benefacts, it is understood that the Department of Department for Rural and Community Development has recently — by a coincidence — had its own business case to set up a centralised database like Benefacts approved internally.
The Benefacts review Mr McGrath commissioned is one of a number he has initiated about funding transparency.
Last September, he commissioned Indecon consultants to review the “transparency and effectiveness” of how National Lottery Good Causes funding is distributed.
That review is not due to be completed until around June.
The Benefacts National Lottery Directory already provides open online access to details of grants provided in 2020 to more than 2,000 nonprofits or schemes using funds that came wholly or in part from proceeds of the National Lottery.