Archbishop Martin calls for transparency in charity sector

The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has strongly supported calls for transparency in the charity sector.

“National governments rightly place new responsibilities for the corporate governance of organisations in the charity sphere, especially when the organisations are recipients of public funds for at least part of their operation,” he said this morning.

“There are legal obligations of transparency and there is always the moral obligation of transparency,” he said.

In the keynote address at a Caritas Europa regional conference in Soesterberg, the Netherlands, he continued that "in today's world any shrinking from transparency will affect not just the image of a charitable organisation or an NGO, but its very integrity. And if we look to identify – to use commercial language - what the comparative advantage of a charitable organization is, a vital part of it is its integrity."

Caritas Europa, with 49 member organisations in 46 Euopean countries, is one of the seven regions of Caritas Internationalis, the biggest network of Catholic charities in the world devoted to reducing poverty and campaigning for social justice.

Archbishop Martin noted that "the British magazine The Economist had a long tradition in each edition of dividing advertisements about jobs into two sections: one at the front of the magazine and one at the end. The criterion for the division was the salary scale that was being offered."

What he found interesting was “that many of those advertisements offering the highest salaries come from what might broadly be called the humanitarian world: government development structures, UN humanitarian agencies, large foundations and NGOs, rather than from the traditional business world. The salaries of those working in the humanitarian area are coming under increasing scrutiny in many countries.

“The fact is that humanitarian activity is business. I do not mean that just in a negative sense. It is however a reality.”

He said “one can criticise the market, but the market is an important mechanism to ensure the efficient supply of goods and services.”

He is “a strong believer in the importance of the free market. Overall it has produced a system for the supply of goods and services which has worked better than any other system. But the market is not a totally rational instrument. People’s fears and anxieties and not just their reasoning are part of the reality of the market system.”

Regulation and transparency are “a necessary part of a market equation”.

However, “for a certain moment in time there was fear that almost any external regulation would actually defeat the freedom which the market requires and thus be damaging. Today we all point the finger at how the lack of or the ineffectiveness of regulatory authorities contributed to the recent economic crisis. We all resort to quoting what is best practice; but sometimes what is considered best practice is greatly influenced by the ideological flavour of the month.”

What was needed was “an economy which provides for the inclusion of the widest number of people possible will not just be morally more acceptable, it will be all the stronger........this is not just moralising.”

An economy was “more sustainable if it springs up within a stable society in which human needs are addressed...Exclusion weakens any society; exclusion damages an economy. ”

He pointed out that “Church teaching is neither totally pro-market nor totally anti-market. The Church looks at an economy as to how it responds to the fundamental needs of people.”

De described the market as “an extraordinarily effective instrument. But there are basic human needs which do not belong in the market place, which cannot be bought or sold like commodities. For those we need something else. The economy will attain its role if it is complemented by effective government, but also by a society with a heart and with generosity.”