Ireland was the highest ever scoring European country for charitable giving over eight years from 2010 to 2018 and the fifth most generous country in the world, according to a study by Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) published last year.

We have always been known as a charitable nation, despite scandals from some charitable organisations through the years. Benefacts, an organisation that harvests data on Irish nonprofits, decided to analyse how charitable Ireland really is and to look at who is giving. They found that those on lower incomes and in rural Ireland are still largely charitable, while the winding up of Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies has caused institutional giving to fall off a cliff. 

The discuss their findings with Thomas Hubert.

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Thomas Hubert: Hello and welcome to The Currency podcast. I’m Thomas Hubert, senior correspondent. We tend to think of Ireland as a generous nation, especially around Christmas time. But new research shows that in the past 30 years, the proportion of Irish families who give to charity has actually halved. And to talk about this today, I have with me on the line Patricia Quinn, who is the managing director of Benefacts, the organisation who is publishing the new figures and analysis.

We’re also going to talk to Dr Oonagh Breen, who is Professor of Law at the Sutherland School of Law in UCD, and Dr James Carroll, who is a post-doctoral research fellow at Trinity College in Dublin and who both worked on this research with Benefacts.

Patricia, I’ll go to you first. To understand where this is coming from, give us a few words on who is Benefacts, the organisation you manage, and what’s the scope of the research we’re looking at today?

Patricia Quinn (PQ): Benefacts is an independent organisation. Our work involves converting raw data into information. We use open data of all kinds from all kinds of sources, the published accounts of non-profit organisations and philanthropies, the regulatory filings of non-profits, but also materials published by philanthropists, by government departments and agencies. We sift it, clean it and normalise it. And then we convert it into actionable intelligence because, believe it or not, this is a €14 billion sector with almost no data infrastructure.

I think of us as civil society engineers. We are burrowing underground and bringing really useful stuff up to the surface and maybe giving it to other people to decide how useful it is and what it means for them.

TH: In the past, you’ve reported a lot on what charities are receiving and how they’re spending it. But this is new. We are looking at what people and organisations are giving. So what’s the scope of this new publication?

PQ: It draws on a body of research which James will talk about in more detail. It’s the Household Budget Survey Analysis or survey data that are collected by the Central Statistics Office. It’s been done for 70 years. They ask hundreds of questions and it is a formidable body of data. There’s nothing to match it. And the very powerful thing about it, which we haven’t even lifted the lid on yet, is the potential that this gives us something that enables us to draw really meaningful, reliable, trustworthy comparisons between giving in Ireland and in the rest of Europe.

Because the household budget survey is part of what the Central Statistics Office does as part of the bigger network of statistics offices around Europe. So we felt that it was very important to embrace this body of data. As you mentioned, it’s not like the open data that we use for our sector analysis report. But moving into this new quadrant, what is given, what is the profile of giving to the sector, we couldn’t neglect this body of really powerful data.

“If you look back to 1987, at that stage, the average weekly donation by a household was €4.25. By the time we come to 2015, that donation has dipped to €3.75.”

Dr Oonagh Breen

TH: And on the other side, you’ve also worked at philanthropic organisations and institutions, we’ll come to that in a few minutes. But first, I noticed that between these two approaches, the individual giving that Oonagh and James are going to tell us about and the philanthropic institutions, there seems to be very little analysis of corporate giving, even within the philanthropic institutions that you’re looking at – I noticed only three, the Arup, Smurfit Kappa, and Irish Times foundations or trusts. There’s not much about, if at all, businesses giving to charities. Is it because it’s not happening or is it unknown?

PQ: It’s unknown, there’s a lot happening, and that’s something that Business in the Community Ireland, I hope, will co-operate with us on next year. We’ve certainly started talking to them about it. The profile of giving by corporates is a world in itself. You have giving by what is called corporate foundations, where the corporate entity actually establishes an independent autonomous entity – which is not autonomous, but an entity which gives a fund that has been set aside for that purpose.

In Ireland, we have very few of those. In the rest of the developed world, they have lots of them and some go back many years. So you have really well-known ones like Volkswagen and Bertelsmann in Germany and there are big foundations going back literally hundreds of years, set up by the banks in Italy and Spain. And then, of course, you’ve got the more modern corporate foundations, all the big tech companies have their standalone corporate foundations. And these are very sophisticated organisations.

Indeed, many of them give into Ireland through their Irish subsidiaries. But that data is not readily to hand. We can access some of it through the tax returns of those philanthropies in the US and we’ve done that. But we’re scratching the surface. So there’s giving by international corporations through standalone foundations and directly. Then there’s the wider corporate giving under the general umbrella of corporate social responsibility, which includes lots of stuff, of which giving in cash is only part.

And then there’s the corporate giving which is, I suppose, perhaps more aligned with marketing spending. So it’s a big, big topic and it’s not one we’re touching on at all in this report. Next year, I hope.

TH: Okay, looking forward to that. Now, going back to individuals and households, I’d like to turn to Oonagh and ask you to give us some of your findings about, first of all, what I think is the most striking finding: the number of households who are engaged in this act of giving. How has this been evolving in recent history in Ireland?

Oonagh Breen (OB): It’s fascinating when we look at the data here. We’re looking at 30 years’ data in this particular report today, so ranging from 1987 when at that stage, four-fifths of the households that were surveyed were giving to charity. By the time we come to 2015, which is our most recent data available at present, that number had more than halved. So we were down to two fifths, in fact, 38 per cent now giving out of their weekly disposable income to charity.

That’s quite a significant decline. And it’s been steady over each report that we have looked at for the household budget survey.

TH: And how does that translate into monetary amounts, whether it’s per giver or donor or actually overall? How much is flowing from families through donations into the charity sector?

OB: Well, of course, that’s a related question, isn’t it? We’ve gone from talking about how many households give to, of those households which give, how much are they actually giving? And what we see again here, Thomas, is a decline in the value of the donations that are being made by those households. If you look back to 1987, at that stage, the average weekly donation by a household was €4.25. By the time we come to 2015, that donation has dipped to €3.75.

And of course, all of these figures are adjusted for inflation. So there’s been that decline. If you think back, if you remember the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, at the height of the Celtic Tiger in 2004, boom days, households were giving €7.25 to charities. So even since 2004, the value that a household gives has more than halved.

TH: James, on your side, you were processing this data to go more in-depth, into what it means. What kind of variables did you look at and what did that tell you about who is behind those aggregated figures of households?

James Carroll (JC): We had a very simple approach. It’s a first pass at the data, in terms of looking at some of the correlations with household donations. So if you look through the literature, there is a standard suite of variables which are normally employed in these types of models, including education, which features prominently, gender, aspects to do with marital status. And then obviously income is an important factor as well. We can control for household age and we also can control for whether the house was located in a rural area or not.

So I think some of the really interesting results that came out of this were, relating to income, for example, we divided our households into five groups from lowest to highest. We find that income is a strong predictor of whether you give to charity and how much you give.

But we also find that those in the highest income group, while in absolute terms they give the most, they give a relatively smaller share of their disposable income. Think of the latter as a kind of a generosity index. In that regard, the lowest income group give the largest chunk of their monthly or weekly salary. So that’s income.

“I wonder were those targets set by people who were still living in the age of Atlantic Philanthropies expecting that there were some unnamed people who were dropping large wads of money into this sector,” says Patricia Quinn. Photo: Bryan Meade

There are other interesting findings. Education is an interesting one because we’ve been talking about the effects of religion over the years for example, but arguably those in higher education probably have lower levels of religious attendance based on other surveys. So that’s something that we can really focus in as an interesting result. Those with really high education do give more. They’re more likely to give and they’re more likely to give in higher amounts. And that’s something that can potentially be used for those that work in the sector in terms of fundraising.

But from a pure research finding, it’s something that’s coming through very, very strong in the data.

Rural households as well. If you’re thinking about variables that might somehow be indicators of certain societal differences, the rural variable could be an interesting one. We’ve discussed this in detail. We haven’t completely decided what the rural effect means. I know Oonagh, you’ve mentioned aspects to do with community and perhaps the tightly knit community, perhaps that fosters charitable donations.

But we see that in the data regardless, we see that those that live in rural areas are eight percentage points more likely to give – and give about 28 per cent more, once we control for income. Obviously, rural households have lower income, but once we can control that fact and control for education and all these other aspects, there is indeed a strong, significant relationship between that rural variable and donating.

TH: Just staying with you James, I want you to actually dig a bit deeper into the age profile because, as you said, older people are the most generous when it comes to charity. Is that a constant through the decades that you’ve looked at, that younger people maybe have less disposable income or other priorities, and it’s only when people get older in every generation that they start giving more? Or are we looking at more of a generational shift now, that the new generation is less connected with charity? Is it possible to see that from the data?

JC: In terms of taking what we’ve learned in this report and making forecasts in what’s going to happen in the future, the trends in terms of age are obviously concerning. If the youngest group appear to be the less charitable, it’s important that we foster the younger age groups so that in future, when they get higher income and get more secure employments, that they will be the donors of the future.

But your question in relation to whether this relationship is steady over time – it is. Now the magnitude will change over time, but that wasn’t really the focus of this report, we really just focused in on the last year for this. But I know from doing this type of analysis over the years, one report with Oonagh in 2005 and then an earlier report – yes, that is something that consistently comes out in the data, that older households are more likely to give and give more.

You mentioned income as a driver, younger households not having income. It’s potentially a cause. But I remind you again that the models that we run here control for income, so there are other aspects happening. Something was mentioned before as well, which is that the method that younger people use to donate might be different. It might be that older households donate more cash and the younger households perhaps use direct debits more. It’s possible, but it’s something we can’t actually say for sure is what’s driving this. But it’s certainly a good hypothesis for future research.

TH: Oonagh, was there any other sticking fact that you noticed in the data on the individual giving that was of interest, maybe unexpected for you?

OB: I think probably the most unexpected one that James has highlighted, Thomas, and I really think it’s important for us to think about it a little bit more, maybe try to understand it, is this notion of the lowest income households giving the proportionately bigger share of their disposable income. And that’s really quite an amazing fact. Those who have less give more. We tend to think when we think about generosity, and when we think about charitable giving, and certainly when we think about philanthropic giving, that next step up on the transformational ladder, we tend to think of that being from those who are well-endowed.

But if we can look at the statistics and if we can look at the data and say that over time, those with consistently more disposable wealth are actually giving less each time the survey is carried out, at a lower rate than those who have less to start with, I think that really does pose interesting policy questions for us, it poses interesting questions about how we incentivise those who have more to do more.

It brings us back to that very French notion of noblesse oblige. The idea that if you’ve been so fortunate as to have been given these great gifts, will you have an obligation to share them with society? So for me, I find that really, really interesting. And I would love to better understand how it is, why it is and how we make that work for society. Encouraging that continuing giving by those less well off, the lower-income groups, but perhaps prodding those with more to do more.

“There are buildings in universities all over the country that wouldn’t be there were it not for Chuck, there are research programs that wouldn’t be there. His foundation also put money into early childhood development and into human rights. And you can see where the money went and you can see the impacts.”

Patricia Quinn

TH: So maybe to go into that space of policy a bit, we’ll first talk to Patricia about the institutional philanthropic side of things. And Patricia, it struck me when we first got in touch to talk about the work you were doing, you mentioned Chuck Feeney and Atlantic Philanthropies, and it’s again mentioned in the publication by Benefacts. Why is this particular example important and what does it mean about the philanthropic landscape here in Ireland?

PQ: Well, when we launched a report in 2017, Caitriona Fottrell was the chief executive of the Ireland Funds, I thought she was being remarkably blunt, she said philanthropy in Ireland is about to fall off a cliff. And so it did. And it was a planned cliff, this wasn’t a surprise to anybody. Atlantic Philanthropies were scrupulous about flagging five years in advance that they had made a strategic decision to spend down all of their assets.

And that meant that over a 30 year period, I think Chuck Feeney, I hope he’s correctly recorded in various publications as having given $8 billion away. A billion of that came to Ireland, a lot of it into higher education. There are buildings in universities all over the country that wouldn’t be there were it not for Chuck, there are research programs that wouldn’t be there. His foundation also put money into early childhood development and into human rights. And you can see where the money went and you can see the impacts.

One of the things that I’m very struck by is the fact that there are quite a number, now, of projects that are failing for want of hoped-for philanthropic income around the place. These are projects in culture, capital projects, that the government has contributed to. And they’re failing or at least not achieving their targets or not happening as fast as anybody might have expected because, you might speculate, unrealistic philanthropic targets were set. And I wonder were those targets set by people who were still living in the age of Atlantic Philanthropies expecting that there were some unnamed people who were dropping large wads of money into this sector.

Well in case they haven’t noticed, that’s gone now for sure. 2019 is the first year in 30 years that most of the philanthropic giving in Ireland is Irish. So we’ve now got an indigenous philanthropic community. And I was really struck by the fact that we knew almost nothing about this. When I started talking about this project and I have to tell you by the way, that it’s Oonagh that put me up to it.

“They have this lovely concept in the US of ‘glass pockets,’ the idea that if you purport to do good with your money, you should really be transparent about what it is you’re trying to achieve. It should be possible for anybody to have a look. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

Patricia Quinn

I remember sitting on a sofa at a conference in Amsterdam maybe two years ago when those things were still happening, I said I wish somebody would use all this data because it’s so interesting and it’s so important that policymakers understand this stuff. And she said, you better do it yourself. So that’s why Benefacts does this. But to get back to the point of having information about philanthropies, people actually asked me: “Why bother publishing a list of philanthropies and telling people all about their work? Because there’s almost none of them. I mean, there’s nothing to say.” And I thought, well, that’s really interesting. That there’s almost nothing to report, we better report that. Because there are a lot of policymakers, there are a lot of people, members of the public and perhaps, I think people working in the sector have a better intuitive understanding of this than most. But we thought, well let’s try and get more of this information out there.

They have this lovely concept in the US of “glass pockets”, the idea that if you purport to do good with your money, you should really be transparent about what it is you’re trying to achieve. It should be possible for anybody to have a look. That’s what we’re aiming for.

TH: The type of projects you said are now running out of philanthropic support – it just brought to my mind, for example, the Parnell Square Cultural Quarter around the new Dublin City Library that was supposed to be partly fundraised and is now being scaled down. That’s the kind of situation you’re talking about?

PQ: That’s the kind of situation I’m talking about.

TH: So what is the landscape now for philanthropy in Ireland, as you said, which is now mostly supported by Irish philanthropists. What are the main actors, the categories that are actually out there that you have identified in this report?

PQ: So there are a few categories, there are independent foundations, which either operate with an endowment or they work with what are called donor-advised funds. In other words, people direct them to give the money to a particular project and use them as an intermediary, like a special purpose vehicle to do their giving for them. And they also do fundraising, some of these, and a good example of that would be Ireland Funds, which operates as a kind of hybrid independent foundation.

And then there are other foundations which are operating foundations. And that would include something like Rethink Ireland, which is social innovation finance, and they distribute funds on behalf of others, but they’re very active in promoting a vision of what they want to see. And they’re very engaged with people they provide funding to.

“Perhaps that’s the reason why the rate of giving is higher in our rural communities – because you know your neighbours, you know who lives beside you, when they turn up at your door and they ask, you are more likely to give because it’s harder to say no.”

Dr Oonagh Breen

And then there is the more traditional old-style sort of philanthropic foundations which simply receive applications. And if it’s in line with their founding purpose, they distribute the money. But what anybody who has worked internationally would have experienced in the form of highly sophisticated, highly geared, professionalised institutions operating with a very strategic focus, that’s still underdeveloped in Ireland, I think it’s fair to say. I mean, I don’t want to decry the work. So let me just say one more thing on that, because I think this is very important. There are some very small foundations that do highly strategic work. They mightn’t give a great deal of money, but what they often fund are pathfinding projects that demonstrate what can be done. And they do the skunkworks that allows the government money to flood in once the concept is proven. And that’s very important.

And there’s another very important thing that small strategic philanthropy does in Ireland. To a limited degree, but it’s fantastic and it should be celebrated. That is they fund things that government tends not to want to fund because they’re risky or because they’re noisy. They’re campaigning for something or they’re advocating or they’re involved in social justice in a way that involves, maybe, being critical of public policy. It’s a controversial space, but it is a space where philanthropists have been active in the past and it has some international credentials, that style of philanthropy. So I would want to celebrate that. It’s not just a scale story. It’s a diversity story.

We’re talking about institutional philanthropy, where somebody has created an organisation or some group of people, or an organisation has been created like the Community Foundation, to provide services to whomever. But I would distinguish between philanthropies and philanthropists. And there are a number of individuals and they’re well-known captains of industry around the town whose names are on some of the prominent buildings in our institutes of higher education and universities.

There are various ways to give if you have a desire to act philanthropically. And that’s another spectrum of giving, as between giving to things that happen and giving to buildings that are current and capital.

12 philanthropies give more than €1m annually

Of the 164 philanthropic institutions identified by Benefacts in Ireland, just a dozen topped the €1 million mark in the amount they gave to charitable causes last year. They are (in alphabetical order):

  • Business in the Community
  • Business to Arts CLG 
  • Charities of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin
  • JP McManus Charitable Foundation
  • Musgrave Charitable Trust DAC
  • Protestant Aid
  • Smurfit Kappa Foundation
  • Social Entrepreneurs Ireland CLG
  • Rethink Ireland
  • The Community Foundation for Ireland
  • The Hospital Saturday Fund of Ireland
  • The Iris O’Brien Foundation CLG

TH: In terms of how Ireland compares internationally, have any of you three looked at this as part of this research and found anything striking? I know there’s this image I started with that at the top of the podcast about Ireland being generous and Irish people being generous. Is it verified or is it done in a different way compared to what you might have seen elsewhere? Who wants to talk about this?

PQ: Oonagh is an unimpeachable international expert on this question.

OB: Talk about setting me up for a fall, Patricia. But let’s have a go at that one for you, Thomas, because it’s such an interesting question. We always want to know what others are doing. Are we doing as well? Are we doing differently? And when it comes to giving and we have to remember, there’s more than one way of giving. So we’ve been concentrated on giving the money here, which is one piece of giving.

And what we know about the Irish and one particular way that we give, is that we tend to give when we’re asked. So we’re very good at the spontaneous generosity, when someone comes along and makes that direct appeal to you. And this goes back to something that James said earlier on. Perhaps that’s the reason why the rate of giving is higher in our rural communities – because you know your neighbours, you know who lives beside you, when they turn up at your door and they ask, you are more likely to give because it’s harder to say no. If it’s more impersonal in the city, you’re less likely to give. The Irish as a nation, we’re very good at that. And we feature well in the statistics when they are revealed as to the generosity of giving, when you’re asked, we respond.

“Philanthropy in Ireland is about to fall off a cliff. And so it did. And it was a planned cliff, this wasn’t a surprise to anybody,” says Patricia Quinn Photo Bryan Meade.

Where we’re not so good, and this I think comes back to the cultural issue again, is this planned giving. If we think of a nation that’s very good at planned giving, we think of the United States and the estate planning starts years before you die. You’ve decided what institutions you’re going to endow and they’ll almost have your name traced out where it will be put up when you’re gone. So there is a very good and set of procedures. There’s a set of legal vehicles. There’s a set of tax-efficient ways to give in those countries.

In Ireland, we seem to even have trouble making wills. We hate to think about death in that sense. So more people die intestate in Ireland than die possessed of a will. We miss out on that piece of planned giving, that notion of the long-term sustainable change. So it’s really only in the last, I’d say, two decades and Patricia might correct me if I’m wrong in terms of my timeline, that we start to get the notion of regular giving, where you sign up for the direct debit and every month so much money comes out of your account and goes to your favourite charity.

“I don’t think that’s the end of the story, there’s also an argument that in times of economic turmoil and crisis that the needs of the sector are clearly larger.”

Dr James Carroll

Before that we were very much – you were approached on the street, somebody rattled a bucket and you put your pennies into the bucket. So we’re different in that way from other jurisdictions. There’s also the counting element Thomas, how you actually count this. And this is why I think this work has great legs, because we have the ability to go out and look at those other jurisdictions you’re talking about and count in the same way, using the same type of data that we’ve used here in Ireland through Eurostat. And that, for me, has great value because then we can start to answer more rigorously the comparability questions that you’re asking of me here today.

TH: You’ve mentioned tax in relation to bequeathing money in your will. Are there other aspects of tax that you’ve looked into, whether on the individual side or on the philanthropic side that appear from this research could be changed, or other ideas emerging there?

OB: Well I think a lot of work has been done in this space just this week. Philanthropy Advocacy in Europe, which is a joint initiative of the European Foundation Centre and Dafne, has launched 27 member state legal and fiscal profiles, reviewing how easy it is or how tax-efficient it is to give in different jurisdictions. Ireland is included in that list of countries so we can now see how we do in comparison to our neighbours.

Can we improve it? We can always improve it, Thomas. We have to know what drives people to give. Do you give because there’s a tax incentive or do you give because you’re passionate about the organisation or the cause you want to support and therefore, regardless of tax incentives, you choose to give? The final thing I would say about that is in Ireland, we take a different approach in incentivising giving and we don’t give the money back to the taxpayer. We actually gross it up and give it to the charity. So we reward the charity with the tax you paid on your donation as opposed to giving it back to you, which is what would happen in the United States.

TH: James, a quick question for you in terms of the evolution in the data you’ve looked at. I noticed a peak before the financial crisis and I was wondering if it was possible to be more refined than that and say, was there a change in the way people gave when the economy crashed in Ireland? Or was it maybe a few years later, when a number of scandals happened in the charity sector, between Console and executive pay top-ups and things like that? Does the timeline show anything in that direction?

JC: It’s possible that the aspects you just highlighted are part of the story, it’s possible, but we wouldn’t be able to pin them onto the trends we’re finding. It’s certainly a very interesting hypothesis that could be explored through other avenues. But unfortunately, the data as provided does not lend itself to answering research questions such as those.

We would have certain expectations in relation to the economy. We know that income is a factor in terms of what drives households to give and give more. And we know that income grows pretty steady from 1994 up to the financial crisis. Within the data, that is seen. We do see a rise up until that point in terms of the average donation amount, up until that point and things kind of decline afterwards. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story, there’s also an argument that in times of economic turmoil and crisis that the needs of the sector are clearly larger.

So there will be a kind of a pull factor into donating. So there’s all these different interplays taking place. It’s very hard to pin exactly a story to it, but overall all we can say is that the trends since 2004 are certainly concerning. Some of the things you flagged could well be part of that story. But unfortunately, we can’t say for sure if they are.

TH: If people want to make up their own opinion, they can see the data. It’s all published now at Benefacts.ie in the new philanthropy section. Patricia Quinn of Benefacts, Oonagh Breen of UCD and James Carroll of Trinity, thank you very much for talking us through all this work today.

Analysis by Benefacts shows those in rural communities are generous in charitable giving. Photo: Bryan Meade.

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