All #NGOs need to be defunded. Taxpayers are forced to support organisations that may not align with their values. Give the money back to our #taxpayers and let them decide where they wish to donate this money. Also, why is there not a governing body for these? #Accountability #TaxPayersMoney #Gov
All #NGOs need to be defunded.
Taxpayers are forced to support organisations that may not align with their values. Give the money back to our #taxpayers and let them decide where they wish to donate this money. Also, why is there not a governing body for these? #Accountability…
— Senator Sharon Keogan (@SenatorKeogan) August 28, 2023
by PoppedCork
33 comments
This one is really lining up run as irelands Sarah Pailn, hopefully here political career goes the same way.
While we are talking about NGO’s and tax, surely religions should be paying tax at this stage.
No one should take what this Anti LGBTQ+, xenophobic gobshite says seriously.
If she had her way we’d be microchipping
disabled kids.
Just another poor far right politician desperate for votes.
The idea that it’s wrong for taxes to go towards causes the payer doesn’t agree with is madness. How would we even implement that? Would you get to choose from thousands of tick boxes where your money goes? Would we only fund things that everyone agrees on, which is basically nothing?
I don’t have children and I don’t agree that my taxes should be going to schools to educate other people’s kids. I also don’t have a car, I don’t want my taxes going to maintain any road that doesn’t get used by buses.
She is starting to really get mouthy on the “culture wars” shite that has no place in Irish Society. Lining up a run for the Dail I would imagine. As I doubt too many Seanad Electors will give her much of a vote now.
There should be an easily accessible simple breakdown showing which NGO gets what.
The whole NGO complex has grown massively on tax payers money. There are hundreds if not thousands of these organisations syphoning public money.
Another blackhole.
Hard agree. The charity/NGO industry is a joke in this country. Most of them only exist so their CEO gets to be CEO of something.
Can somebody explain to me why the sudden hate for NGOs? I’ve seen this argument made by certain culture warrior types – always online – but I’ve never heard a good argument for what the issue is with them.
A supposed free speech absolutionist calling for our civil and civic sectors to be defunded.
She’s nothing if not a complete and utter hypocrite.
And if we said we want our tax money going towards building social housing and public services her crowd and herself would be frothing at the mouth screaming about communism or socialism or some other loaded yank brained term
While I don’t agree with the concept that you should only pay taxes towards things you agree with, Ireland wastes extraordinary amounts of money every year on NGO’s, many of which publish dubious reports that serve only to justify their own existence. If you add up every homelessness charity’s revenue and divide by the number of homeless people in Ireland, it comes to well over €100,000 per homeless person per year.
She’s a literal right wing nazi narcissist who has a career based on wild claims for stuff she never did. It’s like she models herself on the likes of trump where, if you make a claim that’s wild enough, people.wont dispute it and if they do, you just ignore it.
Whenever people talk about NGOs they generally show their own ignorance. Is there issues with public sector funding? YEs like all aspects of the public sector there are problems.
But the Irish state relies on NGOs for core public services. For housing, homelessness, healthy, disabilities, mental health, community centres, transport. NGOs in Ireland are not comparable to America. The importation of that argument is completely stupid.
NGOs are also funded in complex ways, which may seem obfuscated, but in a way it’s actually a strength of the system. NGO funding is done by departments, agencies, and local government. It’s decentralised. There are public competitions which are then decided upon in a very well recorded way (again no withstanding bad apples).
Also, Irish people **already** donate significantly to NGOs because they recognise the core services they provide.
I think it’s very complex. Personally, I don’t have an issue with the NGOs per se, my issue is with politicians who won’t do their job and partly oursource decisions to advocacy groups that are being funded by their departments. There is a fairly incestuous and porous group of full time activists who rotate their jobs around these advocacy and charity groups and their governance and financial control aren’t always adequate.
Ireland Sports governing body, Sport Ireland is a black hole for government money. FAI slush fund…sport ireland provided…. basket ball courts that don’t exist…sport ireland… fraud in cycling ngo… sport ireland.. fraud in Irish climbing body…sport ireland … Olympic tickets fraud… sport ireland… sports NGO with a CEO fiddling the books to line their pockets…sport ireland…theres a lot more.
In sort, if you want money to disappear and no one to be accountable… give it to sport ireland.
They get over 80 million Euro’s a year… and if you thought Deloitte was bad at spotting fraud, sport ireland has them beaten… worse, they cover it up or ignore it because its bad for their reputation.
This is an interesting topic. One thing you see time and again is how the factual information there is about these NGOs in the public domain is curated.
You see benefacts mentioned. You see other bits. Lobbying.ie is another one. I’d like to see what all these groups are and why their agenda on public policy is taxpayer funded. And who decides it in the civil service. And on what basis.
Because we have a problem with the civil service: they are currently arguing a case in the High court that the secret not secret agreement with the RAF may not exist, if it does it’s no business of the courts or the Dáil. Yes that is correct. People are beginning to see the problem.
Yeah like Fuq St Vincent de Paul and Meals on Wheels.
Interestingly, there are over 10x the number of religious NGOs and charities than advocacy NGOs.
Of course the good Senator would agree to ending subsidies to the big holy Catholic NGO too?
I agree, down with those majorly Christian organisations, and also down with the minority of them supporting veterans, and down with women shelters.
Down with this sort of thing.
Also down with public police let taxpayers decide if their value align with the Garda.
/s
This vapid airhead has no idea what NGOs are and most of the BiG MiNdS who spend their time screeching about them don’t either. They glommed onto them because of the medical aid and masks distributed by NGOs during the height of the pandemic, because they’re scared of needles and don’t like having something on their face, and because “NGO” is easy to remember.
You can tell how on-target this article is from the FG’ers who go after Ditch articles etc. turning up.
A certain ex-Taoiseach made an absolute tit of himself getting shitfaced at NGO dinners – and the main reason for hushing it up was the charity was worried about its funding if it came out.
Board Positions are the new Brown Envelopes – as is getting paid silly money to do bullshit speeches.
The entire NGO sector needs a clear-out and cessation of public funding – to be replaced with directly accountable public institutions, where needed.
It definitely needs clarity. Actual charities, let’s call them charities. Gaa, let’s call them sports. Schools, etc. There’s a serious duplication. 5 or 10 ngos doing the exact same thing. Some are doing unbelievably good work, although maybe the state should be fulfilling the roles. Then there’s utter scams. The clarity regulator, much like sipo, is a front. Appearance of accountability.
I would guess that the vast majority of that funding is for charities that provide services like homelessness, social care for the elderly, housing etc.
But sure defund them all just to silence the handful that upset this right-wing nut.
Of course some charities might be wasteful, but they all need to apply for funding and record copious amounts of monitoring data and write thick reports as a condition of their funding.
For advocacy charities in particular (which are probably the ones that are being targeted by this tweet), Ireland actually has very stringent rules around how politically active bodies can be funded. This has positives and negatives. Look at the UK as a counter example, there are many think tanks there doing great work, and many more opaquely funded “NGOs” spreading misinformation.
In Ireland, advocacy groups get government funding, but this actually means government has more control over them than elsewhere. They represent a societal interest and are more “constructive” (from government perspective) and less radical than entirely independent bodies would be.
Providing some money to these organisations to keep them active, providing perspective and ideas that government otherwise would not have access to is important (even if government thinks they’re way off the mark and ignores them).
I think the amount of funding these organisations get is likely to be a rounding error (a handful of people in an office is much cheaper than any type of social care).
Irish civil society is pretty practical and not radically polarised compared to other countries and I think this system is part of the reason why.
My taxes pay her wages, so by this logic she should resign.
Can I also stop my money going to senators?
Everytime I see that dopes face I am reminded that a lot of people voted to keep the Seanad the house of unelectable wankers.
It’s incomprehensible to most people outside of Ireland that we pay around €6,000,000,000 of public funds to around 33,000 NGO’s annually with little or no governance and a complete lack of transparency so the Irish people should have a greater say over who gets what . We pay substantially more than most other EU countries but that’s Ireland the big shots with a substantial amount of funding leaving the state whilst having the worst homeless problem in over one hundred years allied to a failed health service with almost 1,000,000 unfortunate citizens on waiting lists.
To be fair on the point of governance this issue was investigated by the European Court of Auditors in 2018 (report attached) in respect of the EU itself and their conclusion included the following :
“We conclude that the Commission was not sufficiently transparent regarding the implementation of EU funds by NGOs, and that more efforts are needed to improve it. Furthermore, we formulated a number of recommendations for improving the transparency of the EU funds implemented by NGOs.”
https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/ngo-35-2018/en/
Obviously it’s a case by case basis but many NGOs pretend to be apolitical actors or technocrats while fully supporting the agenda of the powerful
Ie the imf with required restructuring mandatory payments
It’s annoying how the government has effectively sublet certain key services to NGOs, especially in the mental health sphere, but the idea that all NGOs should be defunded is obviously mad.
It might be noted that a lot of those NGOs have a religious ethos, for example the Peter MacVerry Trust. And some of them don’t.
Dope. Pointing at the current thing du jour among mouthbreathers and the terminally swivel-eyed, in order to further win over a voting constituency that, nationally, continues to fall within the margin of error. A clown.
Oh shocker, she’s anti-trans, anti-“woke”, and religious. Let’s not be surprised that she’s all about “I’ve got mine, fuck you”.
Yes – stop funding the Irish Cancer Society!
I don’t mind NGOs at all per se my concerns are:
-are we getting value for money? This ties into my other concerns about public contracts more generally (see Children’s Hospital farce)
-is the state outsourcing policy decision making to vested interests?
As long as these concerns (which I think are quite serious) are addressed I’d be OK with this