There is no place in Ireland quite like Dublin’s Carmichael Centre, a 19th-century stone building on North Brunswick Street that is home to more than 40 charities and non-profit organisations fulfilling health and social needs.
Parentline, the Huntington’s Disease Association, Heart Children, Mental Health Reform and Brain Tumour Ireland are just a few of the groups based here or in an additional premises, Coleraine House, across the road. They avail of reduced-price rental space, ranging from a shared desk to a suite of rooms, with shared backup services to help keep each organisation’s overhead costs low. There is also the benefit of advice “on tap” at Carmichael, itself a registered charity that provides training and support for non-profit groups around the country.
The vital contribution of niche charities is often invisible until we need them, says Carmichael’s outgoing chief executive, Diarmaid Ó Corrbuí. It is a sentiment that was reinforced for him at the time of a family tragedy.
When his son, Cillian, died in a rock-climbing accident in Canada at the age of 21 in 2017, the support of the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust was “unbelievable”, he says. It is a voluntary organisation based in Newry, Co Down, that was founded by another father, Colin Bell, who faced the same heart-wrenching challenge of bringing home the remains of his son, Kevin, after he died suddenly in New York in 2013.
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Grief stricken, in a strange country and trying to get Cillian’s body released, Ó Corrbuí was very grateful that the trust stepped in to take care of all arrangements around the removal and transport back to Ireland. Fresh out of UCD, Cillian had gone to Vancouver with friends and, working in adventure sports, told his father in a video call two days before the accident: “I can’t believe I’m being paid to do something I love.”
“So we have that relief that he was doing something he loved,” says Ó Corrbuí, who, with his wife Louise, also has two daughters, Nicola and Lauren, who were aged 19 and 17 when their brother died.
Six years previously, in 2011, Ó Corrbuí came into Carmichael as chief executive, during an economic downturn. “My timing wasn’t the best. The year I came in, the HSE pulled most of the funding for Carmichael. It went from €300,000 a year to €50,000,” he says, as we talk in one of two wooden garden rooms, looking out to grass and flowers at the back of the house. A tree stump, left from a felling by Storm Éowyn last year, has been decorated with fairy doors and colourful toadstools; a hit, no doubt, with Heart Children clients who come here for play therapy once a week.
His first challenge as CEO was to deal with that quarter of a million hole in the budget. Costs were cut, redundancies made, and there was also a push to grow training and advice services that could be offered nationally. As anyone involved with a charity will know, it is a voluntary activity that has become much more complicated over the past decade.
“The training has grown phenomenally in the last 10 years and that’s helped us. Some years, we make a surplus, some years we don’t. But our aim isn’t to make huge profits, it’s to keep the doors open and provide the services.”
Annual HSE funding is still just €51,000 and Carmichael operates with a core staff of 32, some of whom are on subsidised employment schemes. As Ó Corrbuí prepares to retire from full-time work at the end of April, he says his biggest frustration over the past 15 years has been lack of support for the charity sector, when governance and compliance with the Charities Act “has become very complex”.
Implementation of the 2009 legislation was slow, with several high-profile scandals finally hastening the establishment of a charities regulator in 2014. An onerous code, he says, applies to all, from multi-million-euro charities right down to tiny, volunteer-only groups, albeit it with some fewer requirements for “non-complex” organisations.
Nearly half of the State’s 11,500 registered charities have an annual income of less than €100,000. (That does not include schools, which make up a third of the register.)
Certainly bigger organisations need significant regulation and oversight, says Ó Corrbuí, “because charities get quite a lot of benefits from society, particularly the exemption from tax and being able to fundraise from the public”. However, he feels compliance is very hard for smaller, community groups.
“It’s tough for them, with a volunteer-only board, trying to keep on top of all the different things and still run the main business, the services they’re providing.” He would advise small groups to think long and hard before registering a non-profit operation as a charity. However, often becoming a charity is the only way to get any State funding.
About €14 billion of State funding goes into just over 6,000 charities (not including the HSE, which is the Republic’s biggest charity, and schools), according to research by the Charities Regulator published in 2023. Almost one in eight workers in the State is employed in the charity sector, not including the HSE. There are also about 80,000 voluntary trustees and hundreds of thousands of other volunteers, all endeavouring to fill some gap for the public good.
Trust is critical for them. And that’s why I’m a huge advocate of good standards, good governance
— Diarmaid Ó Corrbuí
Society expects – and gets – a lot from charities, Ó Corrbuí says. But when volunteers are being asked to become trustees, with all the responsibilities that entails, they need help. Often charities are picking up the pieces from where the State relied on the church in the past to look after vulnerable people.
“We do a lot of support, but we are only a drop in the ocean.” Understandably, he suggests, there is reluctance among trustees of small charities to spend on training for themselves, taking money away from the services they provide. That is why he has lobbied, unsuccessfully, for an annual voucher scheme for training, which boards could use, or lose, by each year’s end.
While there is written guidance on charitiesregulator.ie, as well as resources on carmichaelireland.ie, he believes there is need for a helpline too. This could offer “hand-holding” to representatives of individual organisations as they cope with issues.
“We would find that they need a lot of help,” he says – and not just with bureaucracy. Personal conflict can be a particular challenge, as boards often have very passionate members. “That passion can become misaligned.”
Individuals may believe they have all the answers. “So if you’ve got conflict and tension on the board, where do they go?
“Then you have the people that feel that they are raising genuine concerns and they’re being ignored.”
While there is an obligation to go to the regulator with any worries about misconduct or legal irregularities, the issue could be that board meetings “are a mess”, he suggests. Perhaps they always start late; people rock up without having read documents; individuals ramble on.
The Irish Times visits Carmichael House on a quiet Monday morning, when retired schoolteacher John McElligott is doing a volunteer stint on reception. Before Covid, there was an annual footfall here of about 32,000; now it’s around 17,000 after hybrid working became the norm.
Beyond the hallway, a dog-legged staircase, edged with an ornamental iron balustrade with wooden handrail, rises to the first floor, under a double-height ceiling topped with roof windows. Built in 1864 as a medical school to serve three hospitals then located on Dublin’s north side, its last use was as a doctor’s residence for one of those, the neighbouring Richmond. The Community Services project, an initiative led by Dublin Corporation official Liam Clare that was to become Carmichael, moved here in 1990.
Parentline is one of the organisations one the first-floor, where volunteer and board member Rose Fahey is taking calls, alongside chief executive Aileen Hickie. While some volunteers work from home, Fahey prefers to come in for her 10am to 2pm shifts on Mondays, when the helpline (01-873 3500) is busy with post-weekend queries and callbacks.
Organisations have to be non-profit, and preferably a charity, to rent a place in Carmichael, for about 25 per cent below the market rate. The arrangement includes heat, electricity and office services such as payroll and photocopiers. No long-term lease is required.
Nationally, an apparent duplication of charities in the same field can seem like a waste of resources. However, Ó Corrbuí believes that unless each one is doing something right, they won’t survive. Each is dependent on public support, he points out, and while their work may look similar, they are likely meeting a need.
Also, joining forces is not as simple as it looks. It is very costly to merge, he explains, because due diligence has to be completed. He is more in favour of sharing office services, as is the case at Carmichael.
For instance, the HSE funds many disability organisations. In theory, it could take a lead and create a shared services centre for them, covering accounting, HR, legal and IT, while allowing each organisation to maintain its own branded identity. There would be economies of scale and centralised excellence. “But the HSE don’t have the bandwidth to take something like that on,” says Ó Corrbuí, who encourages charities to consider collaborations, to share skills and extend reach.
Regulatory compliance comes with a cost in terms of people needed to run a proper financial system within an organisation. While charity donors might say they don’t want their money spent on “back office”, it’s “a false economy”, he says, to skimp on sound foundations.
“We’ve learnt that you can’t take everything on trust.” News of any fraudulent activity within just a handful of organisations is “very corrosive” of public confidence in all charities. “Trust is critical for them. And that’s why I’m a huge advocate of good standards, good governance.”
As full responsibility lies with trustees, recruiting board members can be a challenge. It is a role that can mean hard work, potentially a lot of hassle, and little thanks for “giving back”.
“People would get involved because they have a connection or an interest or a passion. I would say to boards, ‘yes, it’s difficult, but you have to work at it’.” Boardmatch is a good resource for putting boards and volunteers together. (At the time of writing there are 157 vacancies listed.)
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“Without [new] board members the organisations fade away or you have people staying on far too long.” Best practice is to serve no longer than nine years but some people could be 20 years on a board. “That’s not good for the organisation. You have to constantly renew and refresh.”
Renewal beckons for Ó Corrbuí himself, as he leaves Carmichael. A native of Limerick, he moved to Dublin for a Civil Service job at the age of 17 and, eight years later, went into management consultancy in the private sector. He doesn’t see himself as retiring now, simply working less. Consultancy work, but only for charity projects that interest him, is the plan. As is making more time for travel.
We speak a couple of days before he flies off to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, on the Silk Road in central Asia. On his return, he will hand over to his successor at Carmichael, Pascal Derrien, outgoing CEO of Migraine Ireland.
