The top 152 nonprofits ( NGOs?) received €3.69 BILLION in public funding in Ireland in 2024. I've spent months analysing the financial returns of thousands of organisations registered with the Charities Regulator, trying to establish how much public money flows into Ireland's nonprofit sector, where it goes, and how concentrated that funding actually is. Within my research population of 2,634 organisations, primarily across health, social services, housing and local development, I identified approximately €4.98 billion in reported public funding for 2024. But here's the striking part. Just 152 organisations received €3.69 billion of that money. That's 5.8% of the organisations accounting for 74% of the public funding within my research population. The remaining 2,482 organisations shared approximately €1.29 billion. Those 152 organisations break down as follows: 62 in Social Services 60 in Housing & Local Development 30 in Health And the concentration goes further. Of the 2,634 organisations, just 1,671 received €100,000 or more in public funding. Those organisations accounted for approximately 99.4% of the total. This is where our public discussion about "charities" and "NGOs" becomes completely confused. We routinely talk about Ireland's thousands of registered charities as though they're one homogeneous sector. They're not. The register contains everything from tiny volunteer-run community organisations to enormous, professionally managed service providers receiving tens or hundreds of millions of euro annually. Some provide essential disability, housing, healthcare and social services on behalf of the State. Others are community groups, representative organisations or advocacy bodies. These are fundamentally different types of organisations, operating at completely different scales, but they're all thrown into the same administrative category of "charity". An important caveat about my figures. This is NOT a comprehensive analysis of every nonprofit, community organisation or publicly funded group in Ireland. There are thousands of organisations outside my research population, including small community groups, sports clubs, voluntary associations, organisations that aren't registered charities, and entire sectors I've deliberately excluded. The actual number of organisations operating across Ireland's wider nonprofit, voluntary and community sector is considerably larger. My research deliberately focuses on a few core areas, particularly organisations involved in delivering publicly funded services. Another important point: this is 2024 data. We're approaching the end of 2026, so these figures are already almost two years old. If public funding has increased by 5% or 10% since then, the €4.98 billion identified in my research population could now be approximately €5.23 billion to €5.48 billion. That's an illustration, not a verified 2026 figure. And remember, that still wouldn't represent total public funding across Ireland's entire nonprofit and community sector. I've also encountered serious problems with the underlying Charities Regulator data, including missing financial reports and obvious reporting errors. 152 organisations. €3.69 billion. 74% of the public funding within my research population. And I've had to spend months assembling, cleaning and classifying government data just to establish these basic facts.

Ireland's most famous cow led the St Patrick's Day parade with a whiskey inside her, and she lived to forty-eight. Her name was Big Bertha. She was a Droimeann, an old Irish breed with a white stripe down the spine, bought as a calf at Sneem fair in County Kerry on St Patrick's Day 1945 and named after the German siege gun on account of her temper. Jerome O'Leary farmed out by Blackwater Bridge, and Bertha became the nearest thing he had to a family business. She calved. Then she calved again. In 1986, past forty, she dropped her thirty-ninth, Bertha Junior, by a three-year-old Charolais bull, and RTÉ sent a crew to film the mother, the newborn and a farmer who could not stop grinning. The reporter asked, quite seriously, about the forty-year age gap between the parents. Jerome did not see the problem. Guinness put her in the book twice: oldest cow ever recorded, most calves in a lifetime. Then she went to work. Jerome joined forces with two local men who had cancer, and Bertha went on the road: cattle shows, fairs, pubs. She had more engagements than most of the Dáil. Every March she was Grand Marshal of the Sneem parade, walking the whole town down its main street, and before each one Jerome gave her a drop of whiskey to steady her nerves, which is the most Irish sentence ever written about a cow. Between them they raised tens of thousands of pounds for cancer charities. National radio broadcast live from the pub for one of her birthdays. Few cows get a birthday. Fewer get one on the wireless. She died on New Year's Eve 1993, three months short of forty-nine, with two of her own calves still in the herd, the elder of them thirty-five. They waked her in the Blackwater Tavern, and the historian Turtle Bunbury, who wandered in that night by chance, found a full pub standing to drink to a cow. Then she was stuffed, so she could carry on raising money dead, which is a work ethic most of us will not match. A Cork distillery now makes a gin from whey and calls it Bertha's Revenge. Thirty years on, Ireland's Department of Agriculture produced a paper modelling a cull of sixty-five thousand dairy cows a year for three years to hit its emissions targets, two hundred thousand animals, more than a tenth of the national herd, at two hundred million euro a year. When it leaked, the Department said it was a modelling document, part of a deliberative process. A plan, in other words, that it had been caught holding. Bertha ate Kerry grass under Kerry rain for forty-eight years. She gave milk and thirty-nine calves, marched a town down its street every March for the sick, and took a whiskey for her nerves like a Christian. Nobody in Sneem ever called her an emissions problem. They called her Grand Marshal.

Music video for Passing Faces is ooot now ! 🎞️ Wee trip out to Blackpool with the band and a few pals <3