A prominent Irish homeless charity, the Peter McVerry Trust, reportedly spent funds on constructing 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 Francis Doherty that his predecessor, Pat Doyle, had authorised the expenditure.
The Irish Examiner reports how the previous CEO spent €350,000 on resurfacing and widening a driveway, as well as constructing a peacock enclosure and building a second lift shaft on the side of a property.
Mr Doherty appeared before the Dáil’s powerful committee on Thursday, facing scrutiny over the charity’s financial management.
The Peter McVerry Trust had previously alerted the Department of Housing to significant "cashflow pressures" in 2023, leading to the government providing €15 million in emergency funding.
Mr Doherty, who assumed the chief executive role in June 2023, resigned just months later in October as the full extent of the financial issues came to light.
His brief tenure followed that of Pat Doyle, who had been 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, 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 11 May, 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 to its trade creditors, €6 million was owed to Revenue and almost €2 million to the banks, while the organisation had around €437,000 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 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. 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.”
