An ‘indefensible’ amount of money was spent by the ex-CEO of the Peter McVerry Trust to fund a lavish stately home he turned into his private office.
The ‘vanity project’ cost €1million a year to maintain and included an unauthorised private lift for former chief Pat Doyle that later had to be destroyed, as well as a peacock enclosure and lavish driveway.
Mr Doyle’s successor, Francis Doherty, told the Public Accounts Committee yesterday that this all happened while the homelessness charity was verging on total collapse’, adding: ‘Kerdiffstown House became a symbol of what was going wrong and a sense of loss of control.'
Mr Doherty took over as CEO for four months at the beginning of a major financial scandal at the trust which was effectively bailed out by the State through an emergency injection of more than €15million from the Government in 2023. Kerdiffstown House, a protected stately home in Johnstown, Co. Kildare – a short distance from the former CEO’s home – was home to chickens, ducks, two peacocks and other animals.
Fianna Fáil TD Paul McAuliffe asked: ‘It’s a daft question, but why would anybody donate money to the trust for a peacock enclosure?’ Mr Doherty agreed and said it was ‘indefensible’ and inappropriate.
A private lift, which Mr Doherty claimed was built at the direction of Mr Doyle to avoid having to share with other staff members, was destroyed after it did not have proper planning permissions.
Without detailing the cost of the project, Mr Doherty told the PAC: ‘The former CEO [Mr Doyle] did not want service [users] or staff in the basement, in the commercial kitchen, or the same entrance as him in the building.’ Mr Doherty said a further €350,000 was spent on landscaping, repaving and widening the driveway.
The protected structure was home to roughly 150 service users, despite not having the proper planning procedures in place to allow for it as a service site. Fine Gael TD Grace Boland described the developments at the home as a ‘vanity project’ for the then-management of the trust.
Mr Doherty agreed and said that he had always disapproved with the use of the site as a service centre. He said the purchase ‘should have never been supported’.
Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan told the Mail yesterday: ‘I would call this out-of-control spending. It [Kerdiffstown House] was clearly not an appropriate property, the former CEO said that loud and clear… I think it is really unfair to [founder] Peter McVerry himself, and I think it’s bad for this institution, which a lot of people had a lot of faith in.’
Mr Doherty left four months after becoming CEO and accused the previous board of providing him with financial details that ‘could not have been further from the truth’, saying that when he took over the charity ‘was verging on total collapse’.
The financial difficulty came about after the trust continuously underbid on public contracts to win them, and then took on those projects without proper funding.
Gaps in funding were filled by an influx of donations, which totalled €15million at the time.
The current chair of the trust, Tony O’Brien, told the PAC yesterday that a crash was ‘inevitable’.
He agreed with Deputy Geoghegan, who characterised the arrangement as a ‘pyramid scheme’.
Mr O’Brien said: ‘It went on fine – all wrong, of course – but was sustainable when there was a sufficient amount of money coming in from donations.’
Mr Doherty revealed yesterday that a multi-million-euro donation fund was emptied to pay for, among other things, Mr Doyle’s new salary at a private counselling company.
The funding, which was subsequently paid back, came from a €4million donation from a Dublin-based charity, the Capuchin Day Centre, to purchase properties for homeless people.
Mr Doherty was informed that two bank accounts – one for social housing developments and the ‘Capuchin fund’ – had been emptied while he was on annual leave.
A total of €1million from the ‘Capuchin account’ went to a charity also owned by the trust, which in turn transferred it to the trust’s main contractor, Rubycon.
Another €350,000 from the charitable funding went to the private firm New Directions, where Mr Doyle was due to take up a role.
Mr Doherty alleged he met Mr Doyle, and that the latter subsequently informed him the funds for the firm were intended to support his new salary at the counselling service.
Mr Doherty told the PAC this happened even though Mr Doyle was also retained on the trust payroll for two months after resigning.
Several severe lapses in proper financial procedures were detailed by Mr Doherty to the committee yesterday.
He told Fianna Fáil TD Séamus McGrath that contractors were hand-selected by Mr Doyle and deputy CEO Brian Friel, who ‘instructed’ staff to use specific suppliers.
This included Rubycon, which was considered the trust’s main contractor and was paid more than €17million for overall works.
Mr Doherty revealed that it was subsequently discovered that the owner of the trust was Mr Friel.
He said that while the work undertaken by the company was completed to a high standard, there were ‘concerns’ that invoices from the firm were ‘inflated’. This conflict of interest was never disclosed to the trust, Mr Doherty said.
Separately, Mr Doherty detailed that Mr Doyle applied for an €8million loan an hour-and-a-half before formally losing control of all the trust’s finances.
Internally, the trust did not have a director of finance until 2023, and when it did, this director had no access to documents for six weeks until Mr Doherty took over as CEO.
A separate audit and risk committee did not include anyone from an accounting background either, Mr Doherty said.
The committee, he said, had four ‘procedural’ meetings each year, which didn’t happen often during his tenure because of ongoing emergency board meetings.
Mr Doyle did not appear before the PAC yesterday, which saw the current management of the trust, the Charities Regulator, the Approved Housing Bodies Regulation Authority and the Department of Housing take questions from TDs over the scandal.
In a letter, the former CEO said that upon stepping down in 2023, he was instructed by the board not to comment publicly on its affairs.
He added: ‘Between December 2023 and August 2024… I engaged and cooperated fully with both the charity regulator and the housing regulator in their statutory investigations… The findings for both reports were published in the second half of 2024 respectively and are now available in the public record.’