‘Indefensible’ that housing charity spent funds on enclosure for two peacocks

A homeless charity spent funds to build an enclosure for two peacocks at one of its properties in Co Kildare, an Irish parliamentary committee has heard.

The Public Accounts committee was told by former chief executive of the charity Francis Doherty that his predecessor Pat Doyle had authorised the spending.

Mr Doherty appeared before the Dail’s most powerful committee on Thursday to answer questions about the homeless charity’s finances.

“Cashflow pressures” at the Peter McVerry Trust were highlighted to the Department of Housing in 2023 after which the government provided it with emergency funding of 15 million euros.

Mr Doherty became the chief executive of the charity in June 2023 and resigned months later in October as the extent of the financial issues came to light.

He had taken over from Pat Doyle, who was at the organisation for almost 19 years.

Addressing the committee on Thursday, Mr Doherty said that “on the face of it, the trust was a hugely successful and innovative organisation”.

It has a thousand properties, an annual budget of more 60 million euros, 700 staff and provides services for the homeless, those with addictions, ex prisoners and those seeking asylum in Ireland.

He said that as incoming chief executive, he was invited to observe the trust’s AGM on May 11 in 2023, and was told by the board “the organisation could not be handed over to you in better financial health”.

Mr Doherty said it became clear “within weeks” that the board’s representation of the charity’s finances “could not have been further from the truth”.

He said the finances were in “such a poor state” that they were “verging on total collapse”.

He said on the day he became chief executive, he learned the charity owed 9.6 million euros to its trade creditors, six million euros was owed to Revenue and almost two million euros to the banks, while the organisation had around 437,000 euros across all its bank accounts.

He said the charity was “haemorrhaging cash”, that almost every service it provided was running a deficit and that over two years later after issues came to light “the finances are still not fully understood or resolved”.

He was asked by Fianna Fail TD Paul McAuliffe about Kerdiffstown House in Naas, Co Kildare, a historic period property the charity owned, and said the amount of money spent on the property “seems exceptional”.

Mr Doherty said that Kerdiffstown House “became almost a symbol of the things that were going wrong” and “maybe a sense of loss of control”.

Mr Doherty said there was more than 300,000 euros spent on resurfacing and widening the driveway, and a separate amount was spent on building a second lift shaft on the side of the property.

Mr Doherty told the committee that the reasoning given for the second lift, which did not have planning permission, was that his predecessor did not want service or staff in the commercial kitchen using the same entrance as him.

“In all of the different improvements to the property – and as I say, it’s a historic property – the one I was least expecting was a peacock enclosure,” Mr McAuliffe said.

Mr Doherty said: “When myself and my deputy came into office, we got access to invoices, so we could see that there was payments to construct a peacock enclosure at the front of the property for two peacocks,” he said.

“There was the widening of the driveway for 300,000 (euros). It’s indefensible that anybody would think that it was appropriate.”

Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan asked Mr Doherty if the strategy of underbidding for contracts was “anything other than a pyramid scheme”.

He said: “What was happening – or at least, as it appears to me, having read the documentation supplied – was that the Peter McVerry Trust underbid for contracts and then funded those contracts by the subsequent contracts it underbid for,” he said.

“Then when the music stopped, it had no money.”

Mr Doherty said this was “a fair contention”.

“Every quarter, it seemed the organisation was agreeing to open a new service when it didn’t have enough staff to run the services it already did,” he said.

“So when I came in, one of the first things I said to the DRHE (the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive) is that we needed to reduce by at least a third the number of homeless beds we provided because of the risk to staff and service users, because of the level of vacancy, and the fact that we couldn’t justify the money we were receiving because it wasn’t actually then going into the services that they were paying for.”