Charity Coalition Calls for Sustainable Funding in Open Letter to Taoiseach

A coalition of ten voluntary health and social care service providers, along with representative bodies from the charity sector, including The Wheel, published an open letter to Taoiseach Simon Harris on Thursday, October 17. In the letter, they urged the Government to establish a sustainable funding model for the sector.

RTÉ News covered the publication of the letter here. 

The open letter is reproduced below.  

Dear Taoiseach,

We wish to urgently draw your attention to the need to introduce a sustainable funding model for publicly funded service delivery organisations that provide essential services on behalf of the state.

Underresourcing of this work, due to the continuation of funding cuts implemented in our sector during the economic crisis, has increasingly threatened the very viability of service delivery in recent years.

In your maiden Dáil speech as Taoiseach on April 9th last you prioritised areas including housing, health, helping families and empowering people with disabilities. These are among the areas that community and voluntary sector organisations, in partnership with the state and through their own innovation and initiative, work countrywide with hundreds of thousands of service users on a consistent basis.

We appreciate the approval by government in Oct. 2023 of an eight percent wage increase to partially address pay disparity issues in Sect 39, 56/40 and 10 organisations. 

We are disappointed, however, that our staff are being immediately re-disadvantaged by the failure to date to apply the terms of the Public Service Agreement 2024-2026.

Sustainable funding involves more than just improvements in pay. Progress on pay should serve as a stepping stone towards providing sustainability of our public service delivery and certainty for service users. 

To address this we specifically propose the establishment of a Cross-Departmental and whole-of -government approach which would work to:

• Create common understandings, interpretation and funding approaches across all funding departments and agencies, 
• involve all relevant state funding sources to prevent a new tier of underresourced public service delivery
• Incorporate core costs and full cost recovery into service level and grant aid agreements
• Standardise and simplify procurement arrangements
• Move towards multi-annual funding to ensure certainty for service users, staff and management alike. 

During the Covid pandemic our sector strongly supported a whole-of-government approach to deliver a highly effective response to the challenges then facing society. 

We request an immediate opportunity to now progress discussion with you on developing a sustainable funding model for our sector, to deliver on our joint ambition to overcome the current challenges facing public service delivery.

We look forward to an immediate response from you on this matter.

Sincerely,

On behalf of the Coalition of Publicly Funded Service Delivery Organisations:

Marian Quinn,

- Chairperson, Coalition of Túsla Funded Organisations

Elaine Teague,

- CEO, Disability Federation of Ireland

Dermot Murphy,

- Chairperson, Dublin Homeless Network (National Special Purpose Group)

Fergal Landy,

- CEO, Family Resource Centres National Forum

Philip Watt,

- CEO (Interim), Mental Health Reform

Susan Kelly,

- CEO, National Community Care Network

Alison Harnett,

- CEO, National Federation of Voluntary Service Providers

Stacey Lyons

- Co-ordinator, National Voluntary Drug and Alcohol Sector

Wayne Stanley,

- Executive Director, Simon Communities of Ireland

Ivan Cooper,

- CEO, The Wheel.