Well-placed sources in the Peter McVerry Trust have rejected claims by former CEO Pat Doyle that he was forbidden to speak to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee, which was investigating his alleged misuse of funds.
Mr Doyle excused himself from the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday, writing to the current CEO of the Trust to claim he had agreed not to ‘publicly comment’ on the charity’s affairs in August 2023.
However, a source familiar with the matter has said that the board made no such demand and that Mr Doyle had been ‘long gone’ by the time he claims to have agreed it.
Mr Doyle acted as head of the homeless charity for 18 years and stepped down in May 2023, seeking to take on a new role at a private firm.
The PAC was told this week that the former CEO was kept on the payroll for two months following his resignation in May 2023.
Mr Doyle’s successor, Francis Doherty, told the committee that Mr Doyle was not on site or working during this period, even though Mr Doyle was being paid upwards of €20,000 for the two months after his resignation.
In a letter to the Trust, Mr Doyle excused himself from the PAC and claimed he agreed to refrain from making public comments, one month after he stopped getting paid.
He wrote: ‘I wish to state that I gave notice to the Peter McVerry Trust in January 2023, of my intention to step down from the role of CEO in May 2023, a position I’d held for 18 years.
‘After which time, I was asked by the board… not to publicly comment on the affairs of the Trust going forward, which I agreed to in August 2023. I have maintained this position ever since.’
He added that, between December 2023 and August 2024, he ‘engaged and cooperated fully with both the Charity Regulator and the Housing Regulator in their statutory investigations’.
However, the claims have been rubbished by a source familiar with the matter and a spokeswoman for the current board of the Trust.
Both parties have said they have never been aware of any formal agreement of that nature being made.
The spokeswoman said the board is not ‘aware of any formal agreement between the former board and Mr Doyle directing him not to publicly comment on the affairs of Peter McVerry Trust’.
The source familiar with the matter said members of the former board were ‘surprised’ by this detail, which was referenced during the PAC committee meeting.
They said: ‘This was a crisis that took the whole board by surprise, pretty much everything was shared amongst them to deal with the crisis. If it was something as significant as that, it would definitely have been spoken about before that, and it certainly wasn’t.’
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 €15 million at the time.
The source attested that instances of financial mismanagement were ‘absolutely unknown to the board’ until Mr Doyle left his role.
They added: ‘Should there have been better controls in place, yes – with the benefit of hindsight. But the board had no reason to believe that anything was amiss.’
At the end of 2022, the Trust’s accounts were signed off on by an external auditor and information presented to the board at the time which suggest the Trust was on good financial footing.
Mr Doherty, who left four months after becoming CEO, told the PAC that the then-board put in place a condition which sought to prevent him from speaking to stakeholders about the charity’s finances without first receiving permission from them.
He claimed the board ‘deliberately’ put the order in place so that it gave them a reason to remove him from the position.
At the time, in September 2023, the Trust owed nearly €10 million to creditors, and its bank accounts were effectively empty.
The sources refuted this entirely, adding: ‘The board were only starting to investigate how this all arose. That crisis situation was made so much worse, bad and all as it was, when information went public.
‘Once it became a headline, that made the situation 100 times worse. Fundraising was a key part of the organisation; at one point it was €15 million each year.’