Formerly an essential resource for keeping track of the nation’s elephantine NGO sector, the Burkean looks despondently at the effective closure of the transparency website Benefacts.
Providing oodles of information, from funding to governance boards on thousands of NGOs, the website has been a hammer in the toolbox for those raising questions at the manner in which money is funnelled into Irish politics through the backdoor.
Receiving €1.3 million per annum from the Department of Public Expenditure, the data analytic site was also initially kept afloat by way of grants provided to it by Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies.
The bread and butter of what Benefacts did was providing a simple easy to use resource for the evaluating of the sources of income, expenditure, governance and relative size of the entire NGO sector.
The cause of the closure which has seen the Benefacts website go offline and a rapid shrinking of its staff to a skeleton crew has apparently been the pulling of funding from the Department of Public Expenditure which since 2015 has granted €4.67 million to the site.
The decision has incurred the wrath of Benefacts employees, who felt they had been removed from the process by the Department of Public Expenditure with certain key records of meetings missing.
Utilising data accrued from ten public bodies, ranging from the Companies Registration Office to the Charity Regulator, Benefacts formerly kept tabs on the €7.4 billion in funding given to 2,457 non-profit organisations.
For our own part, Benefacts has played an invaluable role in research into various left-liberal NGOs repeatedly sticking their hands into the till when it comes to state funding.
Considering the perennial issues with the charity and NGO sectors in this country, Benefacts’ disappearance is a relief for groups wanting to obfuscate their actual funding streams from the public gaze.
Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, and Benefacts’ own individual archiving efforts, their Trojan work will not be lost entirely to history. Although the additional journalistic grunt work dealing with various state bodies rather than having a central hub could have been done without.
Whatever the real reason for Benefacts’ departure, the shrouded and hurried announcement makes one think that someone does not like outsiders peeking under the carpet.
Benefacts Departure,the demise of transparency in Irish elite,political ,NGOs and govt, robbery of Irish Taxpayers should be fought with tooth and nail. A pittance paid to the only legitimate body in Our Country,compared to the behemoth NGOs parasitic gluttony and waste by a so called govt. who do not give a flying fu.k about any Irish Citizen.Dont forget the BANK BAILOUT, and so called govt.regulators/watchdogs,asleep in their kennells. This is all by design ,orchestrated by all the greedy pigs at the Irish Taxpayers expense.There is no democratic govt.in Ireland, it is a Cartel,mafia style bunch of Thieves n Traitors.
The smell is so bad now,it makes you vomit. They will use their other puppets like fact checkers along with their media control and the RTE LAPDOG, to appease a subservient populace. The Hate Speech laws being promoted and driven by one of IRELANDS MANY CRIMINAL IN govt, Mc Entee the Moron, who wiped the slate clean for all the ILLEGALS,THEIR CRIMES AGAINST IRELAND AND IRISH PEOPLE,and hiding all their past criminal activity. She is A PURE OXYGEN THIEF HERSELF…I would not give a bitch the time of day….an absolute trollop,an idiot of the highest order…but all by design, to replace the Irish with her chosen criminal puppets and traitors.