The Irish nonprofit sector today

Irish nonprofits are constituted in various ways

Nonprofits are established in a variety of different ways: just under half of the organisations in the Database of Irish Nonprofits are incorporated as companies limited by guarantee. A small number are incorporated by statute (some long-established hospitals, higher education institutions) or are constituted under Friendly, Provident & Industrial Society, Trade Union or other legislation. The rest are unincorporated bodies of various kinds — including faith-based bodies and schools — with their own constitution and rules.

Many are charities, a term that acquired new legal force in Ireland since the commencement in 2014 of the Charities Act, 2009.

In addition to these, there are nonprofits that do not qualify in law for inclusion on the register of charities, for example sports clubs, trade unions, business associations and others. We have included them in the database because they fall within the definition of nonprofits used by Eurostat and widely accepted internationally.

19,505 have been included in the Database of Irish Nonprofits because they have registered and lodged documents in various repositories of public information, and we have digitised and analysed their contents.

Principally these are the constitutions and financial statements of companies, trade unions and friendly societies published by the Companies Registration Office (CRO), the public register of charities published by the Charities Regulator, the list of nonprofits (including sports bodies) enjoying charitable tax relief published by Revenue, the lists of schools published by the Department of Education and Science and the disclosures of statutory bodies laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas, published by their Library.

Some are effectively "quasi-public bodies"

Many nonprofits provide services to the public, but a small number operate on special terms with government, inasmuch as their voluntary boards don't exercise control over the remuneration of their employees because these are treated as public sector workers.

Effectively these are "quasi-public bodies". They are the 44 so-called "Section 38" providers of health and social care services, the 22 higher education institutions, and the 281 local providers of family support, drugs rehabilitation, citizens’ advice and other local development supports and services, directly established by government.

In aggregate, this small group of 347 organisations receives more than 70% of reported receipts from government by all nonprofits, and its employees enjoy higher remuneration terms than the sector at large. More about this in the next section.

Here’s a graphic illustration of the concentration of charities across the sector at the end of Q1, 2017, using our localized version of the international system for classifying all nonprofit organisations.

This is a sector of many very small organisations, and few large ones

Nonprofits vary considerably in size and scale. Of those nonprofits for which financial income data is available for 2015, 35% report total income of €50,000 or less.

Another 44% had a turnover of between €50,000 and €500,000, 9% reported a turnover between €500,000 and €1m, and only 12% had a turnover in excess of €1m annually.